Anthony Burke ( AB ): The usual architect’s origin story is of always wanting to be an architect. But you wanted to be a photographer…why? What drove you towards architecture?
Ed Lippmann ( EL ) My father had a keen interest in architecture and was a big influence on me. I remember the construction of our house at Rose Bay when I was a boy. I used to accompany him on weekend site inspections.
During the years after completion, he with my brother and I, built much of the furniture and furnishings. He had a kind of do-it-yourself approach to building and design which was unusual and unique.
He also loved nature and urbanity. That rubbed off on me. We often went to look at new buildings. We visited Christo’s installation at Little Bay, when he came to Sydney to wrap the rocks!
But the big break came when I was 15 years old and my mother took me on a trip around the world. New York was overwhelming and I met my Uncle Jordan for the first time. He was a photographer and took me to a Diane Arbus exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Later, I got interested in photography and familiar with the great photographers, Ansel Adams, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Andre Kertsz. I was absorbed by photography as a creative medium, the way light plays on objects and forms as well as conveying the human dimension which Diane Arbus did so brilliantly.
When I finished school, I wasn’t sure how to combine my creative interests with a career. My parents made it clear that they couldn’t afford to send me to New York to study photography, so I decided to study arts at Sydney University, actually arts/law. After a year of that, I realised I wanted to pursue a creative career, so architecture was the natural choice.
( AB ) Who was it that was most formative for you in shaping your ideas, perhaps values, as an architect?
I don’t think there was any single person or event that shaped me. When I was a boy, I used to read books about great people like Michael Faraday and Thomas Edison – inventors and pioneers who changed the course of history.
I was, and still am, a Beatles and Dylan fan and admired their creativity and social relevance.
I visited the Opera House in the ‘60s, when I was a boy, and it was under construction. It left a huge impression – it was like seeing a monumental Greek ruin coming to life!
Reading Vers une Architecture, a collection of essays by Le Corbusier in first year of architecture school was a tremendous inspiration, an awakening of sorts.
The search for innovation has been a constant theme.
Progress and relevance seem synonymous. In hindsight, all these influences have that common thread.
( AB ) How did the experience of your parents’ arrival in Australia ultimately translate into your approach to practice?
Like many migrants who came to Australia during and after World War II, my parents worked hard, initially to survive, and later to succeed. They had a strong work ethic.
My mother was a pattern and dressmaker and together with my father, they manufactured women’s clothing. My father ran the business and did the selling.
I remember watching my mother laying fabric on the cutting table and arranging the cardboard patterns, minimising waste and maximising the number of garments with the available fabric. It was nothing more than geometry, but somehow, I absorbed the process, and
I think it informed my approach to architecture, in some way, being economical and creative with materials.
( AB ) The experience of New York as a young architect, can you describe it and how it worked on you?
( EL ) My trip to New York in 1979 was transformational. I was 21 years old and had completed 3 years study to get a bachelor’s degree. I was green, but ready for new experiences and I absorbed Manhattan like a sponge.
The energy and scale of the city, the galleries, museums and theatres were overwhelming. There was an intelligence in this place that was high stimulation. I felt like I’d been catapulted into the centre of the world!
A job in Marcel Breuer’s office was a lucky break. I arranged an interview from Australia before I arrived in New York. The economy was booming, and architects were busy but to get the job I needed to turn up for an interview. I arrived with a big portfolio of architectural drawings and black and white photographs.
I was an avid photographer, and it was probably on the strength of the photographs that I secured the job. I initially built models but later got the opportunity to draw. I was mentored by Hasram Zainnoedin, a brilliant designer and longtime collaborator of Breuer’s.
I’ve described my career as an architect as learning through osmosis – just being there in an environment with a direct link to the roots of modernism with people who played an active part in it. Somehow their design approach – the importance of function, materiality and design integrity – became part of my DNA.
( AB ) Marcel Breuer is an imposing figure to have worked with at a formative time in your career. That must have been something! What was it you took away from that moment in New York working for Breuer as a young architect that has stayed with you in your practice?
( EL ) I’d learned about the Bauhaus at University, but finding myself in the office of the last remaining “Master” alive was hard to believe.
After the interview, senior partner Herb Beckhard offered me the job but suggested I also try other firms. I.M. Pei and Richard Meyer, for example had offices a few blocks from Breuer’s on Madison Avenue. I told him I’d consider other options but, of course, I jumped at the opportunity and took the job the next day. I couldn’t wait to get started!
I loved the experience of being part of that firm and couldn’t wait to get to work every morning. I was also among the last to leave. This was the city that never sleeps and I completely understood why! I shared an apartment with an older Chilean architect, Marcelo Gattica, who’d transferred from the Paris office.
A young Australian intern was a novelty in that office but I think it was clear to all that I had a genuine hunger for experience. I worked hard and went to the trouble of studying working drawings of old projects which were kept in the archive drawers. It was amazing to witness the beautiful hand drawn construction documents of buildings like the Whitney Museum.
While post-modernism was raging in 1979, I was getting a firsthand dose of modernism. My creative direction was set from that time on and I don’t think it’s wavered since.
( AB ) You lost your portfolio on the way back to Sydney! How did your experience of New York City change you? Did Australia feel very “parochial” to you when you landed back in Sydney?
( EL ) I had to come back to Sydney to complete my second and final architecture degree, but I wasn’t particularly happy about that. It seemed a step backwards. To make things worse, as you said, my portfolio of photographs and architectural drawings, including the work I had done in New York, was lost in transit. That was devastating because, other than my reference from Herb Beckhard, I had precious little to show for 4 years of study and work.
When I got back to Sydney, I went to see Harry Seidler, hoping to extend my training in his office. When he asked to see my work, all I could show him was a tube of drawings I carried onto the plane as hand luggage – sketches I’d done in New York of the Australian Parliament House for the design competition in 1979. They weren’t submitted of course. I did them after work, at night on my own.
When Harry saw the drawings, he gave me a bollocking and I walked out the door! It was a depressing experience, but in the end, I had no choice but to pick myself up and get on with my life.
I resolved to return to university and replace what was lost in the portfolio with new and better work.
Coming back to Sydney in 1980 was a culture shock. Australia felt like a cultural wasteland.
I decided to go back to university, get my final degree and then return overseas. I met an engineer Richard Hough from ARUP at the University of New South Wales who helped with my graduation project and he wanted to recommend me for a job on one of Norman Foster’s projects in Europe. As it turned out, I never relocated and stayed in Australia.
( AB ) You worked with some excellent practices as a graduate, but you were always going to go it alone. Why was your own practice so important to you?
( EL ) Following completion of the final degree, I worked for my UNSW graduation studio Professor Darryl Jackson for a couple of years and then with Philip Cox on the Darling Harbour Exhibition Centre, but you’re right, I felt the need to do my own thing.
The graduation thesis on high-tech architecture was my manifesto on the future direction of architecture, as I saw it in 1982. I was interested in the potential of new materials and systems of building, of prefabrication, the integration of engineering and architecture. I felt this created a whole new language of architecture which was responsive to the spirit of the times. So, I left the Cox practice determined to give expression to these principles.
( AB ) What does it mean to you to be an architect, trained and practicing in Australia today? What is different about being an Australian architect?
( EL ) Australia is not a cultural backwater today. Australian architecture is recognised globally and we have a healthy dialogue with the rest of the world.
Glenn Murcutt’s Pritzker prize was enormously significant and a boost to all of us younger Australian architects. We’re a fresh young country without the historical baggage of Europe or many older cultures. That said, we’re starting to recognise the value of indigenous culture.
First Nation’s people had custodianship of this continent for 60,000 years and treated the environment far better than we settlers have, over the past 250 years. We’ve started to, and need to accelerate, sustainable practices of building and development in our cities. This is a challenge not just for Australian architects but for architects all around the world.
( AB ) You’ve written that architecture is not so much about the What and the How but about the Why…what do you mean when you talk about the Why of architecture?
( EL ) With the help of advanced technology we’re now able to build buildings quickly and economically. Higher performance buildings with longer spans and greater heights are achieved with increasing speed. We utilise this technology to construct buildings and cities. This is the how and the what.
But technology is not an end in itself, it’s just the means to an end. We’re searching for a more humanised technology and we need to be more aware of the “why” – to consider the consequence and impact of the buildings we build and the cities we plan. I’ve seen expediency and the search for the quick buck all too often lead to outcomes which impoverish the environment where architecture degenerates into superficiality or what Glenn Murcutt calls “merchandise”. As a society we’ve often ignored the need for beauty, to elevate the quality of the built environment, to make music not just sound, architecture not buildings.
In architecture schools, hand drawing is being replaced with AI generated images which is problematic because it creates mental laziness. Drawing is essential to the process of design. Instead of thinking for ourselves we’re allowing the computer to do it for us. The brain to hand connection, inherent to drawing, allows an architect to think while working through a design and for human consciousness to migrate into a project. This thought process, the questioning and exploration of the design process, is fundamental to its value.
Steve Jobs said something poignant about design which also relates to architecture.
( AB ) When you were starting your practice, your work aligned with a more technically expressive late modernism, the Fosters and Rogers approach, rather than the “humanist” post-modernism of the time. What is it about this approach that still holds your attention? How do you see your fascinations and work changing over time?
( EL ) I always saw post modernism as a regressive trend reflecting a lack of confidence in the future, not really a humanist approach. After the Second World War, so much mediocre architecture was delivered en mass in Europe and throughout the western world to meet the demands of large scale urban reconstruction for growing populations. As I said earlier, an obsession with how and what and very little concern about why.
For the post modernists, the Pruitt-lgoe housing complex in St. Louis Missouri, in the USA, was a symbol of the failure of modernism. It was a relentless series of apartment slab blocks, a soulless and inhuman place that was eventually demolished because the residents couldn’t bear living there and vandalised it. Buildings like these were failures, without doubt, but we shouldn’t conclude from that, that modernism has failed. Instead, we need to focus on the need for design excellence, of raising the standards to achieve higher quality.
Good architecture of any period in history should reflect its zeitgeist. After working for Breuer and returning to Australia, I was searching for a contemporary architecture which was as relevant in the late twentieth century as early modernism was in the 1920s and ‘30s. The world had evolved socially and technologically and by the 1980s when I was emerging as an architect, the optimism of Rogers, Foster, Piano and others was inspiring and relevant to that contemporary new world. This was in stark contrast to the classic revivalists and historicists who rejected modernism and returned to the past.
For me, post modernism was for the sceptics, despite its popularity with my peers and the greater profession. I wasn’t surprised that, like most fashions, it died out before long. Modernism is not a fixed style or static dogma but an attitude, not about expressing architecture in a particular way, but allowing design to evolve based on meaningful social values and an honest expression of structure and materials.
Good architecture is of its time and place and should constantly evolve in response to these changing phenomena. Today, of course the debate about the environment and sustainability is demanding greater consideration of materiality and the way buildings perform and relate to their place. This is the challenge that faces us not an obsession with architectural style.
( AB ) I have to ask, was there a particular experience with a building or a project that just cemented something for you as a young architect? What was your go to precedent?
Again, I’m not sure there was one particular building, although I do recall seeing a picture of the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1978 in an architecture magazine. What an amazing sight! It had tremendous energy and audacity, a spaceship landing in the middle of 18th century Paris. If that wasn’t a sign of optimism, I don’t know what was!
In years to come when I studied the building and visited it, I realised it wasn’t just a visual statement. It was a building for people and about people – an urban project that embraced the public and delighted its visitors. It works very well as an art gallery and sure, it made a strong architectural statement about where we were as a society in the 1970s, but as Steve Jobs said, that was the veneer.
( AB ) Let’s talk about some of your key projects. The Andrew “Boy” Charlton Pool, a prominent civic project, was a step change moment in your practice. How did this commission come about?
( EL ) The Andrew “Boy” Charlton Pool, like many other projects of that period was the result of a public competition. There were over 150 entries and 6 finalists who advanced to the second stage. I was one of the six and, fortunately, the eventual winner.
The King George V Recreation Centre in the Rocks had been completed, so I’d already worked with Sydney City Council. But the ABC Pool site was spectacular and quintessentially Sydney – right on the harbour shoreline, half land half water, with a public green space adjacent to it and a stone’s throw from the central business district. It was important to understand and enhance this beautiful place and not to damage it in the way that so much waterfront in Sydney had been before.
It had also been a swimming hole for the indigenous community for centuries before, so this was hallowed ground for all cultures. The solution was a minimal lightweight intervention on a delicate site. The previous building was riddled with concrete cancer and had to be demolished. All that was left were the steel piles on the harbour bed. Above that, we extended the landscape via a series of flat platforms, decks and planes of water providing dramatic views of the harbour, the naval ships across the bay giving swimmers an elevated experience where they would feel part of the natural and man-made environment.
( AB ) Dealing with a vocal and well knitted community can be tough, how did you work with them in framing up your response to the Woolloomooloo site? What did they think in the end? I know you got lots of (deserved) praise, was there anything that surprised you about the reactions to the pool when it first opened?
( EL ) From the time I started the practice in 1985, designing houses in heritage conservation areas in Sydney, I experienced a lot of pushback from local councils and reactionary neighbours. I was no stranger to the Land and Environment Court and became accustomed to defending designs and combatting consent authorities to get projects built. The Andrew “Boy” Charlton pool didn’t attract serious objections from anyone, including the residents of Woolloomooloo or the Finger Wharf. I guess from their perspective the new pool complex was far less Imposing and visually intrusive than the old bunker it replaced.
Don’t forget it was a competition submission selected from a field of over 150 designs, so it was a popular choice. Our major struggle was the building cost, a problem inherent to constructing a structure over water and heritage seawalls, in a corrosive saltwater environment.
In the end it became an icon, the most popular pool in Sydney according to Sydney Morning Herald polls! The fact that it’s one of the only pools in Sydney that recycles harbour water is an added novelty but one that serious swimmers and tourists alike have come to appreciate.
( AB ) 8 Chifley Square. A building of this scale, how did you build your team for this project? What was it like going from small focused practice into a larger context like the one I imagine Chifley required? The change in the practice itself, was that something you planned or an opportunity you really had to react to?
( EL ) 8 Chifley Square transformed the practice. We approached Mirvac as soon as we heard about the Design Excellence Competition.
My associate Tim O’Sullivan told me about the imminent design competition that was about to be launched. The site was, clearly, unique – embedded in the centre of the city, north facing, with three street frontages overlooking a public square. It demanded an equally iconic response.
At the time that we approached Mirvac to take part in the competition, I had delivered some award-winning buildings but nothing over four stories! Tim, on the other hand, had worked in Harry Seidler’s office and spent time with Rogers, Piano and Grimshaw in Europe before returning to Australia and joining my practice in 1993.
We tried to convince Mirvac that we were up for the task but they weren’t initially convinced so we approached the Rogers office who we had a close relationship with. We were able to convince Mirvac to take part in the competition in collaboration with the Rogers practice and all the experience and credibility that came with that.
I think it’s true to say that our scheme blew them away. Tristram Carfrae from ARUP and I presented the scheme to the jury. The concept of the 3 level commercial villages, the treatment of the ground plane and the six star green star rating were pushed to the limit. But there were still concerns around Lippmann’s local capacity to deliver a premium grade office tower in the financial centre of the city.
Even when Mirvac finally decided we were the winners, they wanted certainty that the Rogers office were involved. In the end, the project was delivered with a team of 10 people in our office in Surry Hills including a Rogers team member who relocated from London.
Meeting the demands of a premium grade high rise project like this was certainly challenging but we did it. It was a bigger project then anything the practice had previously delivered. It required good management, hard work and commitment but it incorporated many of the elements honed on earlier projects.
( EL ) Where did the concepts that drove Chifley come from?
Mirvac had established the reverse podium concept in their Stage 1 Development Application. We fully embraced the idea of a building off the ground and pushed it further. The concept of a free ground plane with a tower elevated above was appropriate, particularly when the site is north facing. The second pillar of Mirvac’s brief was their requirement for a 6 star Green Star high performance environmentally sustainable building and we wanted to interrogate that. We learned how to best achieve it and at the time of its completion it was one of the only buildings in Sydney that could claim this standard of performance. The third significant aspect of the project was the “commercial village” concept, or what we liked to call the workplace of the future. We’d done our research with Savills and understood the tenant market in this part of Sydney which demanded a 2000 m² floor plate. The adjacent Deutsche Bank building for example, has big floor plates of that size. Our site was small and could only accommodate 1000 m² plates so we proposed the idea of 2000 m² campus style “environments” with full floor plates every three levels and mezzanines in between. By carving three-dimensional volumes into the building envelope we created transparent workplace environments, encouraging communication and teamwork between staff.
This was the vision of the future workplace. Of course, since then, Covid has changed the workplace yet again, but in 2007 this was cutting edge. The idea proved successful and the tower attracted excellent tenants, the first big “anchor” being Corrs Chambers Westgarth lawyers. Some tenancies are only single level 1000 m² floor plates for smaller organisations and this provided a variety of spaces and the right commercial mix for the development.
( AB ) What was it that you felt Sydney needed, as a city, as an urban environment, that Chifley could provide? It’s such a light touch at the ground plane, so open, and even playful. This seems like a new direction for you?
( EL ) That light touch was part of my architectural approach leading up to Chifley and was appropriate for this site. At the design presentation, I went further, suggesting that Hunter Street be calmed by redirecting traffic and the cafe relocated to allow the public realm of Chifley Square to extend and connect right to the front door of the new tower lobby. That idea was a bridge too far, but potentially a future project.
Sydney City Council’s policy is to build hard up to site boundaries, reinforcing street walls and streetscapes, but that rule can be broken, in my view, on sites like this, which face north and have the potential of significantly enhancing public space.
With the first commercial plate elevated 18 metres above the street, we created a public plaza below – shaded in summer and sunny in winter – with future opportunities to extend this plaza across Hunter Street, and into Chifley Square, by reconfiguring the existing cafe.
With the first commercial plate elevated 18 metres above the street, we created a public plaza below – shaded in summer and sunny in winter – with future opportunities to extend this plaza across Hunter Street, and into Chifley Square, by reconfiguring the existing cafe.
These ideas went beyond the competition brief but showed some bigger picture thinking about how to create better public space in the city not just a high-performance office tower to benefit its tenants. The playfulness and looseness of the ground plane came from the texture of the building, its expression of parts which is appropriate for a building of its scale.
Also its transparency and the ability to see through it from inside and out day and night. Jenny Holzer’s public art was another aspect of this playfulness.
( AB ) With those experiences, at what scale of work do you find your architecture and your thinking most naturally sit?
Ernesto Nathan Rogers once famously said that architecture encompasses everything from the teaspoon to the city.2 I’ve never felt the need to specialise in any one type or scale of building.
These days, we also need to navigate the approval process, especially in New South Wales where the red tape and bureaucracy can be debilitating. These are distinct skills in their own right!
That all sounds like a tall order, but after 40 years of work with exceptional mentors and collaborators, I’m hitting my straps! Whether it’s a fine-grained family house or a master plan for a city, a public recreation centre or a commercial high-rise tower, the essence of good architecture is fundamentally the same. It’s the circumstances – the site, client, scale and budget that varies and this variety makes every project interesting and different.
( AB ) You met Sonia over 10 years ago – an experienced architect in her own right from the other side of the world. How has she changed your way of thinking and working?
(EL) Sonia and I met at the steps of 8 Chifley Square in 2013. She arrived from Barcelona and it was the 40th birthday of the Sydney Opera House. She was organising an architectural tour for the visiting Danish architects and called my office to arrange an inspection of the newly completed office tower.
Sonia came to Sydney to start a better life and we met the day of the divorce from my first wife. It was a miracle that we found each other at that place and time! She hasn’t changed my way of working or thinking but she understands it. We have common interests and sensibilities.
I guess it’s inevitable that she’s an architect.
We finished our house which embodies our values and lifestyle – the gardens, the relationship to the city and harbour. We love it and I hope we share many years there together.
( AB ) There is so much change happening around us at the moment. I keep coming back to a feeling of architecture today being at a tipping point, much like in the 1920s, just as modernism was dropping into Europe and a whole new set of ideals and principals were being explored. What is architecture’s biggest challenge today? How must architecture evolve as a discipline, do you think, going into the future?
(EL) I agree. The 1920s was a halcyon period – driven by big social changes and new technologies which affected art and architecture. A rejection of the past was a healthy and fertile basis to create a new world.
Today, in a new millennium, we’re facing existential threats, more urgent than the aesthetic debates of the 1920s. Apart from climate change, energy consumption, management of waste and water, we have a world where inhumanity persists.
The 1960s, when I was growing up, promised peace and utopia but 70 years later, racism, materialism and selfishness still exist. I’m not sure whether these are innate human qualities, but in many ways, we haven’t evolved at all.
Despite the state of our little planet, we have to look to a future brighter world and not go backwards, to continue searching for solutions to the problems confronting us. This is our collective responsibility. The world has become depleted – forests, animal species and polar ice caps are disappearing – but the world will continue with or without us. We’ve put enormous strain on the environment through overpopulation and unhealthy lifestyles but we have to reverse these trends. We must strive for utopia or, at least, a better world, in the knowledge that we might not succeed, at least not in this lifetime.
Architecture and cities play a critical role in the search for utopia.
I hope this book, the projects and ideas illustrated in it, contribute to that better world and brighter future.
Buy Lippmann 1985-2025 – 40 Years of Architecture
