Tasmania
Hong Kong
Hong Kong
Singapore: Gardens by the Bay (Wilkinson Eyre) foreground, Marina Bay (Moshe Safdie) background
Singapore: Marina Bay Sands Wind Arbor (Ned Kahn)
Singapore: Gardens by the Bay (Wilkinson Eyre)
Singapore
The Ralston (Elenberg Fraser) a 57 unit building in Melbourne. I led the project team through DD and tender documents, and developed the exterior details - rendering by Pointillism
The Ralston (Elenberg Fraser). The challenge was to design a prefabricated, stone, glass, and aluminum panel window-wall system based on off-the shelf components that looked and functioned like a much more costly custom unitized curtain-wall.
A traditional Queenslander house - an inspirational image for a the design of a multi-residential building in South Brisbane that I worked on while at Elenberg Fraser. We looked at the idea of designing the building's balconies to emulate the Queenslander's shaded porches, which create a moderating microclimate outside of the main building enclosure.
Balconies were intended to function as an extension of living space as personal balcony cabanas - providing both solar shading and mitigation of the sub-tropical climate.
The shading system is operable to allow views to the north, while creating overlooking privacy from neighboring units.
University of Melbourne Student Work: Philip Culpan - - The project was conceived as new trash-to-power facility within and adjacent to an existing soon-to-be shuttered Ford Motors plant. The plant would also process and upcycle waste to be used by resident artists and small manufacturers of new products
University of Melbourne Student Work: Philip Culpan
University of Melbourne Student Work: Philip Culpan
University of Melbourne Student Work: Philip Culpan
Sabbatical
August 2014 - August 2015
From August 2014-August 2015, I took a mid-career sabbatical with my family to Melbourne, Australia. My wife had a scheduled sabbatical from her academic job, and I saw the year as an exciting prospect for me: a chance to reflect on the first 20 years of my career and plan for the next 20 years; to think, research, travel, work, and teach outside of my familiar context in order to spur new ideas and sharpen my resolve in my design values. The idea for taking this type of sabbatical was driven in part by Stefan Sagmeister’s wonderful Ted Talk “The Power of Time Off”, in which he advocates for taking a sabbatical every seven years as a way of recharging creative energies and bringing forth new ideas.
The thinking and research I did was focused on uncovering some of the ideas and approaches taken by thoughtful architects over the past fifty years to complex architectural problems, as well as the questions and notions raised by the critical sphere, in an attempt to give my own future work a broader base of potential directions. Architects tend to do a lousy job of speaking openly and clearly about their design process, leaving critics to interpret the completed designs. With the proliferation of imagery available on the web, we now tend to react to one another’s images, instead of sharing ideas. The most innovative design work is the result of thinking that was crystalized over time, and often started five years before the final project photographs are taken. Chasing architectural trends through imagery means always being five years behind the true innovators whose work is based on compelling ideas instead of superficial imagery.
For travel, in addition to seeing the major cities and hidden away natural beauty of Australia, we visited Singapore, Hong Kong, and Surabaya, Indonesia. I’ve always found that travelling to foreign cities armed with a camera allows me to open up new approaches to my own work through the study of both the exceptional and the vernacular – the common architectural approaches taken for granted locally that are often a revelation to the foreigner.
Additionally, from September 2014-May 2015 I worked as a Sr. Project Architect/Project Leader on multi-residential projects (50-200 units) in Melbourne for one of the leading firms for this building type in Australia, Elenberg Fraser. I led the project teams (a total of about 8 people) for two projects from the Marketing phase (25% DD) through Tender and Construction Documents, as well as early Conceptual Design/Town Planning work on three other projects. EF is an office of 120 people, with a strong design culture. The office gets about 200 new projects a year – about 4 a week, so there is a constant buzz of design thinking, a lot of innovation in the use of parametric scripting (via grasshopper) for quick design iterations, and an ongoing demand for fresh ideas and marketing identities for each new project.
I also taught a master’s level studio at University of Melbourne, the top-ranked architecture school in Australia. The studio was focused on designing a sustainable power plant that had a secondary program to address the socio-economic issues of a heavily industrialized, but economically depressed suburban community outside of Melbourne: education, domestic violence, employment aged care or pollution Teaching was very valuable for me because it forced me to clarify my design values and the understanding I’ve developed about the architectural design process over the past 20 years. The studio also produced a website that collated research on community/campus scale sustainable energy generation that can be found here: http://www.sustainableenergyresearch.org