Glenn Murcutt

Catherine Hunter has followed and documented the work of celebrated architect Glenn Murcutt for thirty years and collaborated on a number of film projects. Two films, The Cobar Sound Chapel and Spirit of Place, show his humanity and skill in pursuit of an architectural vision that always seeks to respond to place and provide delight.

Glenn Murcutt | Spirit of Place

Murcutt’s extraordinary international reputation rests on the beauty and integrity of his buildings. With a swag of international awards (including the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 2002, the 1992 Alvar Aalto medal, and Japan’s Praemium Imperiale for architecture in 2021), Murcutt has literally put Australian architecture on the world map. Murcutt’s focus has been the creation of energy-efficient masterpieces perfectly suited to their environment and his breakthrough designs have influenced architects around the world.

Yet he’s an enigma.

Australian Islamic Centre, Newport, Melbourne, 2016 © Anthony Browell

By choice, he has never built outside his own country. Murcutt believes one must understand a place intimately before good design is possible. He has no staff, no computer and no email. He insists good design comes from the hand, not the computer.

In the words of the Pritzker jury: “In an age obsessed with celebrity, the glitz of our ‘starchitects’, backed by large staffs and copious public relations support, dominates the headlines. As a total contrast, Murcutt works in a one-person office on the other side of the world ... yet has a waiting list of clients, so intent is he to give each project his personal best. He is an innovative architectural technician who is capable of turning his sensitivity to the environment and to locality into forthright, totally honest, non-showy works of art.”

This documentary is very much about process - the design, the building and most of all the relationship with the client. A commission to design a mosque for the Newport Islamic Community in Melbourne is the heart of this film.

“a beguiling and beautifully balanced biographical film from writer and director Catherine Hunter”

“As this quite brilliant film from Catherine Hunter shows, the now 80-year-old Murcutt has long eschewed publicity, preferring to let his work speak for itself. But he allowed director Hunter to film him as he embarked on his most challenging project to date — a mosque for the Newport in Melbourne.

Graeme Blundell, The Australian, Pick of the Day, December 6, 2016

Glenn Murcutt on Mosque roof © Jesse Marlow, Fairfax Syndication

Glenn Murcutt - Spirit of Place was a finalist in the 2017 Walkley Documentary award, and won the People’s Choice award at Archiflix Sydney and Melbourne. The documentary was selected for numerous film festivals including the 2017 Chicago International Film Festival, the 2018 Palm Springs’ Architecture and Design Arts Film Festival and opened the 2017 New York Architecture and Design Film Festival. In 2018, it also screened at festivals in Los Angeles, Washington DC, Athens, Copenhagen, Lebanon, Bangkok and Budapest.

Glenn Murcutt - Spirit of Place was developed and produced in association with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and developed and financed with the assistance of Screen NSW, principal investor Screen Australia. The Producer acknowledges the support of Screen Australia through the Producer Equity Program.

Director & Writer/Catherine Hunter, Cinematographer & Editor Bruce Inglis, Producers/Catherine Hunter and Julia Overton, Script Editor/John Muldrew, Composer/Amanda Brown. First screened on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 2016.

2019 ADRIAN ASHTON PRIZE FOR ARCHITECTURAL CULTURAL AND LITERATURE

Journalist and filmmaker Catherine Hunter won the Adrian Ashton Prize for her documentary Glenn Murcutt: Spirit of Place, which depicted the making of Murcutt’s mosque in Melbourne. Hunter previously received the prize in 2006 and was commended in 2008.First introduced in 1986 as a biennial award, the Adrian Ashton Prize recognises an outstanding piece of architectural reporting and criticism.

“This work adds another valuable record to the documentation of Australia’s only Pritzker Prize winning career to date. More importantly, Hunter shows us an Islamic community in an evolving industrial suburb of Melbourne, who might otherwise have been considered a marginalised voice in a marginalised place, invoking its agency to take control of the narrative that has built up around it, and seeking to prove that it is just as much an Australian community — an active and integral participant, inclusive and embracing — as any other in our society.
Hunter’s work does so by deploying architecture to evoke these values and embody this openness, thus demonstrating even to architects the power of our own practice and product. The community’s struggles — with budget and time overruns, with wet weather, with self-doubt and weakening morale — is not brushed over but shown ultimately as part of the reward of the process.
By reaching out to a broad television audience, ‘Glenn Murcutt: Spirit of Place’ does not simply exhibit architecture to passive viewers, but captures the act of one section of the Australian public speaking to the whole — a dialogue spoken through the medium of architecture, and documented through the medium of film, arguably the best available medium for the task.” Jury citation

2022 ADRIAN ASHTON PRIZE FOR ARCHITECTURAL CULTURAL AND LITERATURE

“In an exceptionally produced piece by Catherine and Bruce for Compass, the story and success of the Cobar Sound Chapel is told through interviews with the client, consultants, contractors, and community members who brought this project to life.

The Cobar Sound Chapel is a permanent sound art installation in Central Western, New South Wales.

Interviews with the client, sound artist Georges and architect Glenn Murcutt, are refreshingly complemented by a broad range of voices that have embraced the project wholeheartedly. From the musicians, who helped compose the exhibited sound piece, to the late former Mayor of Cobar, Lilliane Brady OAM; their relationship with the project is told against the backdrop of Cobar, the visually stunning lands of the Ngiyampaa Wangaaypuwan people.

Well-rounded storytelling brings this small but beautiful project to a broad audience to demonstrate how joy and emotion can be embedded into architecture.” - Jury citation

Cameraman Barry Nichols and Catherine Hunter on location in Cobar.

REVIEW| The Guide, Sydney Morning Herald, May 2, 2022

AN ODE TO INSPIRATION AND COLLABORATION (ABC Compass, May 8, 2022)

“Catherine Hunter adds to her reputation as one of Australia’s pre-eminent arts documentarians with this ligh-filled study of how an abandaned water tower outside the central western NSW town of Cobar became the Cobar Sound Chapel. An ode to inspiration and collaboration, the unlikely project’s driving forces are composer Georges Lentz and revered architect Glenn Murcutt (a recurring Hunter subject). In the midst of ‘red dirt country’, as Lentz rightly describes it, the pair plot a cube inside the rusted shed, open to the star-filled sky and possessed of sublime acoustics. It’s not an overwhelming commission, rather, a small intricate piece, and the pair’s mutual enthusiasm - backed and brought into reality by the local community - leads to a moving transformation.”

Director & Writer/Catherine Hunter, Cinematographers/ Bruce Inglis, Barry Nichols & Klae McGuiness, Editor/ Bruce Inglis, Composer/ Georges Lentz, Musicians/The Noise String Quartet. First screened on the ABC Compass program in 2022. © 2022 Catherine Hunter Productions

© Catherine Hunter Productions 2024