Selected works 1988–2020
Providing insight into John and JWA’s practice in limited words is perhaps best framed through the lens of John’s most accomplished work – “Waterview” on Bruny Island, an unfinished and complex score, layered with multiple chords, placing Susan, family (including the team at JWA) and friendship first. History, education, investigation, discovery, making, remaking, experimentation, artisans, craft, collaborations, adventure, nature, environment, community, repair, storytelling, humour, fossicking, eBay, Gumtree, tip shops, collecting, disposing, passion, teamwork, trust, pride … and just a touch of obsession. Congratulations to John as the extraordinary conductor of an incredibly loyal and talented team of quiet achievers who finely orchestrate an endless pursuit of exceptional architecture.
Jon Clements Director, Jackson Clements Burrows Architects
“Justine, we know it is your day off, but John was wondering if he could have a quick word.” Amanda Ritson, then John’s amazing PA, has rung me at 5 pm on a Wednesday. I am editor of Architecture Australia, but today I am at home with a baby and a three-year-old (it’s all a blur, really). It is close to witching hour. John comes on the line, his charming and self-deprecating self – “I know you’ve probably finished the layout, but I’ve just got one more photo …” I can’t remember if we used the extra image, but in my hazy recollection, this was just one of a fair few Wednesday afternoon phone calls.
A few years later, the kids are bigger and we are lucky enough to visit John and Susan at their house on Bruny Island. They are marvellous hosts. John bundles us into a jeep to see the farm. We come across a lamb huddled next to its dead mother. Rescued, the lamb joins my partner, Paul, and the kids in the back seat. To this day, John is known in our house as “the architect who got Dad to hold the smelly sheep.”
Like anyone who has worked with John in some capacity, I have lots and lots of stories – of charm and tenacity, of generosity, and of pushing everything until the very last minute possible. But these are the two that stay with me.
John is delightful and frustrating – knowingly so. I was aware of this when I came to work with him, Stefan [Mee] and their colleagues on JWA’s second monograph. What is most enjoyable is his genuine pleasure in collaboration, his real interest in other people’s ideas, knowledge and experience, and his open and inventive responses to what it might be to work together.
We also share an interest in finding opportunity in the serendipitous stuff that arises as any project proceeds. This, of course, means that the path is never straightforward, but it results in a never-ending fascination with how and where work can develop – and that is very rewarding.
I came to know John Wardle as a neighbour on Bruny Island. The first time we met he graciously gifted me an antique flyswatter, second AIF issue, circa 1941, twisted wire-handled and peeling leather-strapped, replete with some raisiny remains greasily imprinted on its rusted mesh. It was one of 200 John had bought in what he clearly felt to be a bargain. It seemed to be about something, if I could only work out what that something was.
These days, knowing John a little better, I think it’s curiosity and wonder at the smallest thing, a near manic joy in divining beauty in the overlooked everyday and the ability to transform materials and space so that we might see both anew with his exalting eye.
He discovers whole worlds in the most minute and too easily dismissed details, and reimagines them as rooms, walls, buildings, and, finally, communities. Better places to live, in other words. All of which is easily said but only with difficulty realized – and what is that but the true mark of a master?
Richard Flanagan Writer
My knowledge of John Wardle, and his practice, comes through the lens of his residential work. In my world, he holds a record, of sorts: of the six books I have written in the last 12 years, his projects have found their way into five of them. This is because of both his architecture and his fascination with collecting objects and curating his interior spaces. He has the remarkable ability to apply the same intense focus to commanding a large architectural gesture as to buying ancient Syrian stones the size of a child’s fingernail (I witnessed this process in a São Paulo antique market). Curiosity defines him and this finds a way into his work. For example, I love the way he used the built history of Captain Kelly’s Cottage to shape future decisions; how layering and craft added richness to the project; and John’s joy and inventiveness in producing his own furniture and ceramic designs.
Karen McCartney Author
Working with John is an invitation to a creative journey shaped by his passion for place and material, by his capacity to reimagine a project’s possibilities, and by kindness. John is an architect with a craftsman’s sensibility. His buildings grow out of place while always bearing their maker’s distinctive mark. They respond beautifully to their urban or rural setting, their environment and the community, of which John sees them as an integral part. In creating these wonderful spaces, he brings an attention to the materials and crafts of making them into buildings so that his architecture speaks through the language of the practical arts. They are enduring works.
Rufus Black Vice-Chancellor, University of Tasmania
I like John. He’s a collector – of people, ideas, experiences, stories and simple but beautiful things. He’s a raconteur, an extreme creative and an unconventionally nifty salesman. His dynamic duo of Shearers’ Quarters and Captain Kelly’s Cottage on Bruny Island makes your heart skip a beat. John invited us down to do one of our Man About the House shows there a few years back. It was a still and sunny winter afternoon, literally picture-perfect, as we grappled with performing in one of the best living rooms in the world and competing with a similarly impressive view. I was looking around outside for a power point and John was pacing up and down, telling us a rather detailed story about a teapot or something that he’d found in a junk shop. I managed to get his attention long enough to ask about a power point but he just shrugged and went on with his story. The man who is the master of his craft, and who elevates the craft of others, knows that there’s more important things than power points.
Tim Ross Comedian, radio host, design enthusiast and television presenter
Over decades, Wardle and I have chatted about what practitioners chat about, with many diversions, but not often about JWA’s actual output.
The practice’s starting point, where buildings were planned and fashioned as if they were landscapes, has provided a worthwhile underpinning. The coherent upscaling of these initiating ideas and JWA’s building know-how, combined with the expansion of the practice itself, has yielded something rarely seen: interiors rather than tenancies, exteriors rather than facades, forms that have contours rather than outlines, decoration that synthesizes rather than minimizes, character that invites participation rather than a snub. All this has not been a fluke. Technical limits have been pushed, with consequent skill increases evident. There are many buildings and they are not easy to imitate.
It is unlikely that much of this will come up in my conversations with Wardle. But this is the occasion for some things to be said.
Timothy Hill Principal, Partners Hill
Occasionally, I am asked how we managed to grow from a small to a large practice. I reply: good fortune, perseverance, and a very particular combination of people. But there is something else, too. John enjoys inviting others to the creative table. This can make for the occasional tussle, but also a complex stew of ideas, and – in a growing practice – more custodians of those ideas. He has an intuitive knack for finding the right moment to intervene with a new thought, tweaking a detail or reframing an entire problem. A film director might operate similarly. With John's guidance, our design culture has evolved to be both open and directed, loose and tight, diverse and singular.
Stefan Mee Principal, John Wardle Architects
Eternally optimistic. Variously generous. Driven by instinct. Mercurial, and even contrary, at times. A shape shifter, of sorts. John is all these things. He has a remarkable ability to bring people together and hold them in that slightly uncomfortable space that is a necessary condition for a truly collective effort. He offers razor-sharp insight, and the capacity to riff off an idea to arrive somewhere entirely unexpected. His greatest work – arguably greater than any single built project – is that of founding and growing our remarkable practice. And this he has done with a deep commitment to creating a better world.
Meaghan Dwyer Principal, John Wardle Architects
Yael and I kept coming back to it. It haunted us … it intrigued us … it amused us … and it was unbelievably aesthetic. For surely in the 2018 Venice Biennale, the independent exhibits were worthy, sometimes well crafted, occasionally propositional. But John Wardle Architects' Somewhere Other was a reaffirmation that architecture can say – and do – so much, if it wishes.
Rushing down to the Oz pavilion to gush our appreciation to him, we found John sweetly shy about it and sincerely flattered. Yet, each time I have been given the “new stuff” Melbourne tour by the indefatigable Martyn Hook, we have had a mutual “Hey, he's really good, isn't he!” session in front of each Wardle item.
So, when John came to the Bartlett [School of Architecture at UCL] recently, we understood extra dimensions of his thinking in his detailed description of some houses and then – and then … the extraordinary new private gallery building for Sydney [Phoenix] simply drew one's breath. As always, I was intrigued to get the feel of this amongst a cosmopolitan audience that is regularly pummelled by bright young (and old) things with lots of fashionable philosophies and intellectualized reasons for being dull. I could sense that they found themselves in the presence of that rare phenomenon: a most talented architect.
Peter Cook Architect, lecturer and writer
In 1952, Italian architect Ernesto Rogers famously claimed that Milanese architects designed dal cucchiaio alla città (“from the spoon to the city”): they worked on designs for a spoon, a lamp, a chair and a skyscraper, all in a normal working day. This is what John Wardle does, too – and it is the distinctive aspect of his practice and the team of people that he has been able to gather around him over the past 34 years, since he established John Wardle Architects in 1986. John has the obsessive eye and virtuoso skill of a master joiner. His buildings, their interiors and the way in which they engage with the city or a landscape resemble the careful placement of a piece of highly wrought furniture in a larger setting – what the Italians call arredamento. In the context of the last three decades of Australian architecture, John’s contribution has been astonishing: exquisite houses that bend and twist to a view; university buildings that pronounce their presence and which students curl into and swarm through; apartments that bristle; a bridge of steel sticks that leaps. And, perhaps his most personal contribution, a folly: Somewhere Other, his architectural eyepiece for Venice in 2018, a gift to his peers. Who said that Australians could not be proud of making? Bravo, John – congratulations.
Philip Goad
Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser Chair of Australian Studies, Harvard University, 2019–2020 and Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor, University of Melbourne
Somewhere Other, John Wardle Architects’ installation for the 16th International Architecture Biennale in Venice in 2018, embodies the elements that are a hallmark of John’s practice: a passion for art making, for artists and creative collaborations; a belief in the power of storytelling and the power of space to elevate our senses and transport us emotionally; a love of material, tactility and texture; an acute sense of spatial choreography and a generosity to those that occupy and interact with a space; a commitment to finding and elevating people who retain the depth of knowledge and skill to make things, to craft at an exceptional level; and an ability to bring together the systems of industry, technology and the digital realm with the analogue, re-elevating the underappreciated in a world infatuated with newness for the sake of newness. Underneath it all is an immense curiosity for the way in which architecture that is specific to our context can keep evolving.
Ewan McEoin
Senior curator of contemporary design and architecture, National Gallery of Victoria
At the 16th International Architecture Biennale, in Venice in 2018, Somewhere Other captured a new experience of beauty that stood out loud, and wonderfully so, introducing John Wardle’s architectural idiosyncrasy to non-Australians. It rewarded visitors with an experience they were unfamiliar with until that moment. As Gaston Bachelard wrote in his book The Poetics of Space, “the poet does not confer the past of his image upon me, and yet his image immediately takes root in me.” In the work’s surprising vignettes – enigmatic and profound – clarity and precision raised the volume of that sensuous dynamic encounter. It was as if a magician had created an immediate relationship between those visitors at proximity to each other, leaving them bemused but with a smile of joy on their faces. This intriguing, non-linear space was humorous, too.
Poetic? Yes! Beautiful? Yes! When architecture is extremely beautiful, most people agree that it is beautiful, and thus the subjective experience of beauty – which no one can define in simple terms – turns objective. In Somewhere Other, the statistical power was at work and the conclusion was crystal clear.
In his 1999 book Inner Vision, British neurobiologist Semir Zeki, a world expert in the neural correlate of the experience of beauty, wrote that painters work and rework until an effect is achieved that pleases them – their own brains; and if, in the process, it pleases others, “they have understood something general about the neural organization of the visual pathways that evoke pleasure, without knowing anything about the details of that neural organization or indeed knowing that such pathways exist at all.” That observation led to one of Zeki’s most quoted phrases: “Most painters are also neurologists.”
With the same logic, one can conclude that brilliant architects know how to probe the human mind with design techniques that are unique and known to them, as they intuitively understand the visual pathways that evoke pleasure. John Wardle is one of them.
Yael Reisner Architect, researcher, curator. Director of Yael Reisner Studio
About four years ago, John called with exciting news. The following Monday, I should expect a call to invite me to go with him to Denmark. That weekend I started to prepare. This involved sorting all of my vitamins, tablets and potions into neat piles (they unfortunately take up considerable space in my suitcase). So Monday morning comes and Camilla [Block, co-director of Durbach Block Jaggers Architects)] gets a call, inviting her to Denmark. And I’m like, “Hello …?” A few minutes later, John calls. “Don’t worry,” he says. “I’ll give a talk when I’m back and it will be almost the same as being there, but without the jetlag.” John returned and we saw a few photos and scribbled notes, but talk of a visit came to nothing.
I’ve always enjoyed listening to architects talk about their influences. It’s often more enlightening than hearing them talk about their own work. When I was at university, Peter Eliastam used to visit Australia to give talks about Le Corbusier. It was a remarkable metaphysical excursion. Through his insights, we saw his totally particular version of Le Corbusier, but we also got to see Peter in a different, reflected Corbusian light. Because the role of the critic is not to criticize but rather to take us on a journey somewhere new, to help us see in a fresh – maybe a different – way, and to guide us through the light and air.
About a year ago, John called to say that he was being invited to São Paulo and it was more than likely that I could come, too. Stay tuned until Monday, he said. That weekend, I started to prepare. This involved sorting all my vitamins, tablets and potions into neat piles (they unfortunately take up considerable space in my suitcase). Monday comes and John calls. “I’ve just spoken to the organizer, and this time unfortunately you can’t tag along.” His voice trails off. “But don’t worry,” he springs back. “I’ll give a talk when I’m back and it will be almost the same as being there, but without the jetlag.”
And it became true. We sat together and listened to John as he transported us to São Paulo, taking us on a journey somewhere new, to help us see in a fresh – maybe a different – way, and to guide us through the light and air of that remarkable architecture.
It is that ability to be generous that makes John glow, and it is his humour that is so glorious. We met on the site of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Venice in 2004 and we’ve stayed friends ever since. I haven’t been to Bruny yet, but I believe the afternoon light makes the simple shed look like it’s made from gold. Maybe someday, one Monday, he will call.
Neil Durbach Director, Durbach Block Jaggers Architects
My brief to John was to design a place where art and performance were honoured. The building should be an icon and the best of its kind in the world. Completely unique and timeless.
Success. The brief for Phoenix was understood and executed.
Judith Neilson Philanthropist
What seems like a long time ago now, John and I were on a junket in Denmark. We skipped a more worthy government agency meeting and went to a secondhand market. I ummed and ahed about a tiny ceramic plate with three nubby legs that would take up valuable space in my luggage. John bought an enormous, cast iron pot. I still have no idea how he got it home to Australia. He twinkles when asked but never tells. John is a bowerbird at heart. A collector. Of things, of places, of people, of stories. His work springs from this collecting – from making, layering and craft. His nature is additive. His spirit is generous. John wants to take you with him; he thrives on consensus. John is endlessly suggestible. He makes certainty as he goes, never taking a straight path but knowing exactly where he is going. In the end.
Our (mine and Neil Durbach’s) long collaboration for Phoenix with John and with Khai Liew has become a great friendship, underpinned by John’s endless interest, inexhaustible belief in joy, good humour and deadpan pranks. Phoenix was such a privilege. I wish we could do it all again. But it’s likely to be a once-ina-lifetime thing. Like a Gold Medal, richly deserved.