Self-confessed design nerd Tim Ross first shot to fame on our airwaves. Since moving across to our screens, he has been sharing his love of architecture with audiences across the nation – including past and present students of Giralang Primary School. His latest venture, Designing a Legacy Series Two airs on ABC TV on Sunday 4 June. CW’s Jessica Cordwell caught up with Tim Ross at the National Museum of Australia to discuss design and where Australian architecture sits on the world map.
1. Tell us about ‘Designing a Legacy Series Two’.
It’s the follow-on from my last one but it is split up into two ideas: one that looks at how architecture and landscape combine and our relationship with the Australian landscape; the other one looks at how architecture can help build community.
They’re just stories about architecture being accessible, and beautiful homes and really simple homes as well, hidden stories.
Locally, the most recognisable for everyone will be a great piece on Giralang Primary School by Enrico Taglietti and he was one of my favourite architects and I’d been obsessed with this school, obsessed with him for years. I just wanted to get him and this school on TV as an example of how great design can be timeless and it can make young people’s lives far more interesting.
The architecture of our schools is really important and to spend time with the kids and hearing how they love this open-plan school, that almost 50 years later is just as relevant and just as successful as when it opened, was an absolute joy.
Connecting people and architecture together, storytelling and architecture is really important. Also, more important than ever as we’re talking about our buildings, is they have another story to tell; in terms of colonial buildings, there was another story that was happening in tandem to that. Discussing how we make sure we tell that story and the ways we can do it or start the conversations about it which I think is really important, and fascinating as well.
2. When did your interest in design start?
I’ve always loved architecture and design ever since I was a little kid. I grew up in the Mornington Peninsula in a suburb called Mount Eliza. When I was a kid, I’m riding around on my bike with my brothers and doing all sorts of naughty things, there’s all these amazing modernist houses, all the great architects of the time – Robin Boyd, Roy Grounds, Kevin Borland – all these other fabulous architects. They kind of just sort of set into me; it’s like the great songs of Hal David and Burt Bacharach – you wake up one day and you love every one of the songs.
It was just laying dormant for a while, I think. I’d always collected furniture, I love mid-century modern furniture, and I got more and more interested in architecture and design. The intersection of art, architecture and design became a passion, became a job.
The first series I made for the ABC Streets of Your Town, I’d been wanting to make for ages. The story of how we had some of the best domestic architecture in the world and how we ended up with some of the worst, it was a cool story to tell.
3. Do you have a favourite architectural era?
I hope it’s ahead of us, to be honest, which is a strange to say but I’m hoping architecture’s role in designing better homes for everyone, designing homes that are better suited to our climate, that will help with resilience in terms of floods, bushfires, all the things that are going to come with climate change. Hopefully, there is that role for architecture to really solve some problems.
It’s quite naïve to think maybe architecture has a bigger role to play in housing affordability but that could be interesting, a different housing model.
There’s no doubt that I fell in love with the architecture of the ‘50s and ‘60s and into the ‘70s, that’s always been my jam. Then you know things change all the time and I often find myself being drawn to really decorative things, which is really unusual, I declared myself as a modernist. I like everything but I think that modernism will always have a strong place in my heart.
4. Where does Australian architecture sit on the world stage?
Where it really sits above everyone else is not in our public buildings, apartments or commercial buildings. Where we are blessed is we’ve got a little bit of room here to build interesting houses, and we’ve got an extraordinarily good climate that enables us to use the outside in ways that you can’t in other places in the world.
Increasingly in an Instagram-led world, our domestic architecture, residential architecture is some of the most published in the world, people are fascinated by it. We’ve just really found our way, I think. There are different regional styles for our architecture based on our climate which makes things really interesting. Where it reflects what’s going on in our climate and embraces our landscape, when we do embrace our landscape, our lives become better, our homes are better for that.
So much of what we do here doesn’t do that; we’re still building houses that are too big, that are taking over the whole block. People don’t want to plant trees, we can’t encourage them enough and they don’t want them, and there’s not enough green space and people are stuck inside, so we’ve got the best and the worst.
I think, truly, people are looking to our architecture for inspiration.
5. What’s next?
I’ll be doing a Designing a Legacy live tour and then working on the next one, I’m writing a Designing a Legacy book. Then just anything, shows in architecturally significant houses, all things going well making another series with the ABC.
See Tim Ross in Designing a Legacy Series Two on ABC TV, Sunday 4 June 7.30pm; abc.net.au/tv
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