2006 RAIA National Conference

John Wardle Architects was founded in 1986 and from a springboard of small domestic commissions typical of the Australian architectural experience has grown to a practice of thirty staff working across a wide range of project types and scales.

A design process that emphasises ideas has been enlarged in scope from single houses to more recent large urban projects. Story telling has become a methodology for navigating through the development of a design using the personal and collective histories of the practice’s clients, memories associated with a particular site, landscape and built context as generators of a cohesive narrative. Some of these strands are real, others imagined, but all contribute to a building design that is tailored to fit both client and site.

Current projects include single houses, apartment towers, university buildings and commercial office towers ranging from $0.5m to $200m. The practice fosters a collaborative studio environment to excite and develop these ideas and is noted for the degree of intensity applied to design detail regardless of project scale.

John has been a visiting lecturer at Columbia University, New York, lectures periodically at RMIT University, Melbourne University, Deakin University, and Universities of South Australia, Western Australia and Queensland. In 2003 he was the keynote speaker at the Houses and Housing Conference NZIA Conference in Auckland.

The Practice has been the recipients of 24 Professional and Industry Awards of which 17 are RAIA Awards including the Sir Zelman Cowen Award for Public Architecture and the Victorian Architecture Medal.