Different Country

Shaun Carter (SC): Your philosophy of architecture seems to fundamentally relate to site and place. You, more than most, seek a fundamental understanding of country. Deepwater Woolshed might be considered a revolutionary building in regards to the woolshed type; but I suspect you really just thought about it from that position that you approach all your architecture. Would that be a fair thing to say?

Peter Stutchbury (PS): Deepwater Woolshed, in many ways, was a key project for our team. It helped validate our process along with revealing the unpretentious aesthetic of accurate integrated decisions. I was fortunate to work with Sacha Zehnder on this project.

We spent three days at the site, and it was good that we did because the prevailing breezes that come down from the north-east turn on a small mountain called Mount Albert near the site then coming in from the west which is very unexpected. So we had to design the wool shed according to some very precise site conditions and then we just basically looked at the patterns of the site. Growing up on the family farm I had an understanding of the functional nature of a shearing shed.

So we systematically went through the building and made functional decisions about its workings. And in a funny way it got to the point where the functional decisions were providing the aesthetic qualities, there was a wonderful symphony between the two. It was never a competition of thoughts and to me it was quite a revelation – a step up in design, not a step down. It was the opportunity to design a building, the way one truly understands how to design a building, which no one has ever really assessed. The result was a great lesson to me because in some sort of innate way it made sense in the landscape, even though it was a functional building. The big eaves were about shade; the sheep actually baulk when you get to the contrast of light at the face of the shed which to date had not been managed properly. These big five metre eaves were beautiful in the landscape but off the ground at the precise height for loading wool bales onto the back of the truck without mechanised means, it also meant it hovered above the landscape and site, it changed scale across the broadness of the land dependent upon a reference – when a person was there it looked big and when a truck came along it was small.

We did the auditorium at Newcastle where we trapped the heat emitted from people and used it to temper the heat from the ground, so that it rose from 21 degrees geothermal up to 24 degrees output. So like that we caught the heat from the sheep, captured within a lowered ceiling, we took that heat across and blew it on the shearers in winter. It was all these very systematic, programmatic and functional things that we did, accurately and cheaply actually, that worked! As a consequence, we’re doing further woolsheds developing the systems.

SC: So you’re designing woolsheds for people and sheep, rather than just getting the wool off them. It seems a more empathetic way of designing. You mentioned that it taught you a few lessons as you went along. Could you tell us about those lessons, and could perhaps some the functional or programmatic elements that you needed to solve inform an architectural language. Would that be accurate?

PS: Exactly right. What I learnt (without trying to learn it), what I discovered really, was that if you’re forthright enough to make clean, clear decisions, your architectural skill will negotiate those into architecture. You don’t need to make an architectural decision first, you can make it as part of the process of making or designing the building. So if the early decisions are clear, strong and functional decisions the later decisions seemed to belong in harmony; rather than sing out of tune.

I think as you move into a more public building or private residence the ambitions of those decisions is the understanding of scale and light. That’s the ambition. That functional strategy is really interesting. For instance, we put the shearers’ rest area on the north eastern corner. So it had the morning sun, but it didn’t have the afternoon sun because it can be bloody hot.

One of the shearers came up to me and said, “Do you have any idea how beautiful it is to use this? In the morning we get the sun and in the afternoon we get the shade,” he said, “It’s perfect”. And we put the water tanks on the south east corner where there’s the most shade and you make those decisions. And they seem obvious, but it’s the way you inform a building and I think the building benefits from that, that’s the great lesson. In terms of making architecture there is another special thing, which I think is mood – which is the one thing we all struggle to find.

SC: I guess in some ways that is like this country. What I love about Aboriginal culture is not only the deep understanding of the land and their place in it – taught to them by the harsh but beautiful Australian country. These are fundamental lessons, if you unlearn them then no computer or device is going to get you there, you are going to have to relearn them all over again.

PS: Yes, what aboriginal people believe is that they are part of a refinement, so that each generation is refining the last one’s way of life. Whereas we as a culture are concentrating on

upwards. That each one of us is better than the last. Which is not how the Aboriginals see it, they don’t see it as better or worse, but as a refinement, getting clearer and clearer. It is something Western culture doesn’t seem to understand, we miss the fundamental process of respect.