TWEET AND THE STREET: AN INTERVIEW WITH PHILIP THALIS
MARYAM GUSHEH You have a lively social media presence, on Instagram and Twitter (now X, sadly). Scrolling through your posts is a lot like walking around Sydney with you: curious, attentive, sharing your knowledge about urban formation and character, pointing out oddities, facts and figures, systems, details, hidden gems, topographical clues, favourite works, new discoveries – and in almost all cases with a view to their strategic relevance. There are exemplars: what has been, is being, done well, effectively, inventively. There are also bold criticisms of design and policy shortfalls, urban inequities and erosions – travesties!
In these posts, your voice as an architect and critic appears as one. You leverage your knowledge and informed observations about the city to advocate for, and serve, the public good. What is it about such social media platforms that attracts you?
PHILIP THALIS Every detail of the city is a conscious decision that’s been argued for and chosen. There are no accidents but plenty of mistakes. So, in our job as architects, observation and curiosity are critical. Professor Peter Johnson used to tell a great story about Professor Leslie Wilkinson [founding dean of the faculty of architecture at University of Sydney]. When Wilkinson encountered students reading the paper on the tram on their way to university, he would clutch the paper and say: “You should be looking out the window and observing the world.” For me, it’s about reading the city like a book. And it’s about communicating with the broader public, which we do poorly as a profession. I have accumulated all this material through years of teaching, research, work and looking – social media presents another opportunity to transmit this knowledge to a broader public, to build a culture of architecture and city-making.
MG I thought we could use a selection of your posts as prompts to discuss your approach and priorities. Let’s start with a relatively rare and extraordinary biographical note – a spirited portrait of your mother Jacqueline, posted on her 100th birthday! Your parents were first-generation migrants, coming from multicultural Alexandria and war-ravaged Europe. Growing up, did you feel connected to their heritage and culture? Experiences of war, displacement, migration? Their cosmopolitanism? Has their experience been significant to your humanist point of view and advocacy for an inclusive and heterogeneous city?
PT Yes, certainly. They both spoke four or more languages. My mother had a master’s degree
in literature and philosophy which wasn’t recognised in Australia for decades. As it happens, I was sorting through her papers last night and discovered a substantial folder of decades of rejections by the Department of Education. So, over dinner growing up, this sort of discussion was common. And for my mother, these injustices towards migrant working women were sharply felt. [She wanted to] combat the prejudices, the discrimination.
MG It’s the 1980s. Your fluency in French takes you to Paris in your year out from university and subsequently to a master’s in “Urban Architecture” at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris-Belleville. Your study and work there consolidated your interest in a complementary relationship between architecture and city-making. What is the role of urban research in this creative process? How do you move from urban analysis to architectural design? Or are they synonymous?
PT My master’s course was shaped around the work of Bernard Huet and Bruno Fortier, and their knowledge and love of the city and city-making. At the same time, I worked with committed modernists in Paul Chemetov and Yves Lion. Jean-Louis Cohen was also an important figure, bridging the two approaches. It was such a stimulating period and I was exposed to contrasting perspectives, but I never saw them in opposition. It was different sides of one complex story, of how to make architecture in the city, and resolve the good and the bad of the modernist project.
Sometimes, my interest in urban history is miscategorised; the key point is that urban research is the process of city-making. It’s the process by which we understand the forces that have shaped the city, many of which remain alive today and in which we are participating. You discern and identify the good projects and (through design) amplify these strengths, while correcting the fault lines and mitigating bad tendencies. My time in Paris emphasised the longterm project of city-making, a characteristic that is underestimated in our newer cities in Australia.
MG Public Sydney as a puzzle! Look closely at urban clues and along the way you will find many urban treasures! Your book Public Sydney was the culmination of years of painstaking research on Sydney’s most significant public buildings and spaces. There is so much about this book that I would like to discuss – your definition of public space, the importance of your long-term collaboration with Peter John Cantrill, your research approach through studio teaching (in this case hundreds of students), the role of drawing in research and analysis – so much! For the sake of space, I’d like to focus on civic expression – the vigour with which public buildings and infrastructure announce themselves. How significant is an exuberant civic expression for engaged and inclusive public space?
PT I often say public space is a physical representation of democratic society. Public architecture is therefore absolutely fundamental to the civic and democratic character of the city. That’s why they matter so much. The other important aspect of public architecture, as you can see from the example of Darlinghurst Courthouse, is its enduring qualities, as fixed points of reference in a city – yet that doesn’t mean that they’re ossified. Aldo Rossi talked about propelling and pathological urban artefacts, and Darlinghurst Courthouse is an absolutely fantastic propelling urban
artefact in that it’s grown as the city and its public spaces have grown around it. It may well change use in the future – hopefully to a public gallery, perhaps as part of the National Art School – just as the governor’s stables transformed into the Conservatorium of Music and a functional wharf into a fabulous theatre. These seemingly incongruous changes abound: the Rum Hospital is now the New South Wales Parliament.
They give the lie to functionalist rhetoric which people from the modernist era were brought up with. What you find out is that the buildings are more important than the program and that if the buildings are memorable enough, they can adapt. It comes down to what I call “public imagination,” realised through the skill of the architect.
MG Here’s a post from your #SydneyTerraceHouse series.
You often draw on your understanding of urban organisation and form, and your prolific knowledge of Sydney, to highlight inventive modifications of generic urban types and rational systems according to local conditions. Local factors can include urban geometry and landform, as you illustrate in this post on Liverpool Street Terraces, or other salient variables, from geology and hydrology to planning, and cultural and political protocols. Am I right in thinking that for you, these localisations help shape distinctive qualities of place – the character of cities? Is this tension between the systematic and the particular important to your own creative method?
PT My interest is in urban housing more generally. Let’s look at terrace housing beyond their picturesque qualities. We need to be more discerning about terraces – after all, they were the project homes of the nineteenth century, often jerry-built. Nonetheless, they are an interesting model of urbanity, and they are very much a material fact of Sydney – they negotiate Sydney’s difficult topography and the quirks of historic subdivisions. Therefore, they are so instantly different to the Melbourne terrace. Brisbane, in contrast, largely skipped the terrace type, so it is important to go beyond rote learning to understand the characteristic elements of each city. What amazes me about this example in Liverpool Street is how these terraces have managed to slope, fan, step and negotiate the bend and a narrowing in the street while still building a continuous row – and on both sides of the street! No one thinks of the terrace house as being able to do that. I would implicitly call this Urban Architecture. It’s a skilful demonstration of using architecture to negotiate and amplify the urban situation – the practical solving of plan and section in relation to the urban character. In our work, we enjoy these sorts of challenges.
MG Multiple-housing commissions have been important to your practice and have given you the opportunity to imaginatively and persuasively challenge the status quo. From low-cost housing models to the intensification of tight urban sites to adaptive reuse, you have resolved tough constraints to deliver dignified housing via literate works of urbanism. You have worked well with smaller and mid-scale builder/developers who appreciate the value-add of strategic design, and you have battled for regulatory approvals to achieve better diversity and measured densification. These projects have been hard-won and speak to your commitment to quality housing as a fundamental right to the city. For quite some time, you have advocated for procurement and policy reform in the housing sector. What role do you see for architects in mitigating the current crisis?
PT Certain cities are characterised by one type of housing. Athens is a case in point, where one postwar apartment type dominates. The same goes for Haussmann’s Paris, which also adopted a uniform type, and it’s similar in Chinese cities. In the twentyfirst century city, we need a diversity of models and types, enabling a heterogeneous city. We need to look forward in time and space, not just backwards. Urban planning is too often represented by the regressive banality of zoning, or by urban theories such as dull-witted contextualism. They are dead ends that entrench an anti-urban status quo. As architects, we need to champion good housing design, based on our accumulated knowledge drawn from centuries of great models in a range of cities from around the world. We must master the quantities intrinsic to urban housing and transform them through design into living qualities. Allied to our typological flexibility to deal with the vagaries of any given site, we need to be able to project positive models for an evolving urbanity.
Your practice commenced in 1992 in partnership with
Sarah Hill, and early competitions with Richard Frances-Jones, Peter John Cantrill and Rod Simpson and others were significant. You have continued collaborative projects within and outside your practice. And you have made a substantial contribution to architectural education, encouraging and supervising urban research by some of Sydney’s now most respected practitioners – Camilla Block, Elizabeth Carpenter, Angelo Korsanos and Rachel Neeson, with Rachel and Angelo later working with you at Hill Thalis. Long-term colleagues – Kerry Hunter,
Laura Harding, Sheila Tawalo – have been vital.
Here are two posts from the #architects and their buildings series. Your posts commonly highlight achievements by your colleagues and peers. Can you discuss your role as mentor, collaborator and participant within this engaged community?
PT The early years of our practice were challenging, and we struggled to build anything – certainly anything of quality. We were just scrambling to find projects. (Still scrambling!) So, teaching was important, and competitions were, to some extent, helpful in establishing a reputation.
Many people use Instagram primarily to promote their work – that’s not for me. I am much more interested in growing a culture of architecture and very happy to celebrate the great works of my colleagues. I think we should be much more generous and collegiate. We need to explain to a wider public the qualities of good architecture – we vacate the field to others like real estate agents at our peril. I think that communication and persuasion are a vital part of our societal role as architects. It’s in all our interests to build a richer, broader conception of architectural culture.
MG Vale Jack Mundey, indefatigable advocate, and concept design for a casino!
There is a paucity of Australian architects willing to speak up in defence of the public realm with the conviction and colour of your friend and mentor Jack Mundey. To run an architectural practice and at the same time critique the forces by which the city takes shape – it’s risky and takes courage. You, along with Hill Thalis colleague Laura Harding, have been exceptions. Your bold criticism of the privatisation of Barangaroo – to take just one example – has been blistering (and in this case also hilarious!). How has your vocal advocacy impacted your practice? How do you negotiate or integrate the two?