POETIC LICENCE
Angelo Candalepas first sketches his fabled architectural creations in words before taking up his drafting pencil.
WHEN I ARRIVE for my 2pm meeting with Sydney architect Angelo Candalepas of Candalepas & Associates, I am asked to take a seat in reception. He is drawing, says his assistant. When I get to his second-floor office he is still drawing intently with ruler and drafting pencil in hand. “I just had to finish this off,” he says. Therein lies a clue to his personality – unhurried, focused and very much running his own race. Drawing has always been a talent, even as a child, he says: “I looked back recently on the artworks I created when I was 10 or 12 and think maybe that would have been a good direction for me.”
From his builder father he learnt about the components of building – the noggins and the cleats. While at school he developed a broad philosophical understanding of the world through the classics – Latin and Greek – and music and literature. An architecture degree at UTS followed. The written word is of extreme importance to him. “I imagine an entire design of a building in words, a bit like a poem, and then I draw it,” he says. With a passion for US-born British poet T.S. Eliot he is selfaware enough to know that his approach is not for everyone in his profession. “I am sure there are a lot of architects in this city who find my discussion about poetry unbearable. But, equally, I find their dry-biscuit attitude unbearable,” he says.
One of his most notable and widely-awarded projects (including the Sulman Medal 2018) is the remarkable Punchbowl mosque, initiated in 2007, with a brief to marry tradition with contemporary design. “Embedded in [this] was a sense of creating something for the future, so that when people looked back in 1000 years’ time ... it would show our interest in people as yet unborn,” says Angelo. The human hand is evident in the making of the 102 concrete hemisphere domes, 99 of which are inscribed in gold with the names for God in Islam. In the National Architecture Awards (2018) it won the award for Public Architecture with the jury citation noting, “Punchbowl mosque is a sublime essay in the potency of in-situ concrete.”
Deeply religious (he is Greek Orthodox) he says he believes that “architecture is one of the arts that can allow a ‘universal’ understanding of emotional experience to form an epiphany.” This preoccupation with the enduring nature of architecture takes several forms and he is guided by his belief that it is important to have “a sense of observation of the world – to keep the sense of history safe”.
When an existing client asked him to look at a new tower project in Sydney’s Castlereagh Street on the site of the existing Australian Workers’ Union Building, built in 1887 and renovated in the 1920s, he agreed. In what might seem a counterintuitive move he lobbied for the retention of the building, preserving the sense of a ruin, in what became the Hellenic Club. “Architecture is a cultural enterprise and it is important to understand the entire city as a single artifact,” he says. “Sometimes this means that you must make an assessment that whatever you can produce won’t be as good as what’s already there.”
Yet it would be a mistake to think that Angelo is a rarefied practitioner operating at the esoteric edge of the profession. Rather he is very much in the thick of it, understanding the nexus of creative and commercial, working with longstanding developer clients that he considers philosophers in their own right. “They have the ability to take a broader view. They engage in the discussion of first principles in every design to see where we can start and end,” he says. Hence, he has designed some of the city’s best multi-residential apartments with rigorous, handsome facades and internal spaces that prioritise light, air and views while mitigating street noise. I proffer that he is, in my book at least, the undisputed ‘king of flats’.
A recently completed development of 24 apartments, The Surry in Sydney’s Elizabeth Street, has a facade of green and orange tiles, which he describes as “delicious. I wanted a building that was able to offer a smile to people as they walked towards the city,” he says. He is a firm believer that architects must pour their emotions into the city for it to be a better place. “And so what I try to do is only work on an emotional level.”
When it comes to designing apartments it is not only the grand gestures but the minutiae that concerns him. “I like to know where people will put their keys and wallet down, where they would cook an egg. What they feel like when they come home?”
How was the process, I ask, for a refined and tailored residential renovation he undertook for his sister in Sydney’s Kensington? “Well, let’s just say if ever there was a sense of stitching things together this was it. I felt like a runaway sewing machine or even an overlocker. Everything comes out in the end and she and her family love the house but at the beginning they didn’t really understand what on earth it is I do.” candalepas.com.au