If the South Australian Emerging Architect prize affords us a glimpse of the shape of things to come for Adelaide’s built environment, then from all reports the future looks pretty bright.
Alex Hall (HASSELL Studio) was the 2013 Emerging Architect winner and Sean Humphries (Alternative Design Studio) was the 2012 prize recipient. The Plan caught up with the dynamic duo to discuss the pros and cons of being an “emerging architect” in Adelaide.
Hall is now senior architect at HASSELL and has been with the Adelaide-founded international practice since he was a student at UniSA in 2004. Being with a global practice has exposed him to large-scale, complex projects such as the UniSA Hawke Building (with John Wardle Architects), the Adelaide Zoo entrance and giant panda enclosure, and the UniSA Master Plan – all of which are recipients of numerous SA architecture awards.
Hall says the Emerging Architect Prize is an unusual one “in the sense that it’s awarded to an individual – whereas most of the projects I work on are collaborations”.
Humphries now runs his own practice, Alternative Design Studio, which specialises mainly in residential architecture and interior design. Humphries cut his teeth over seven years at well-established local residential practice Williams Burton, before venturing out on his own. He shot to local archi-stardom with collaborator Sasha Radjenovich for their multi-award-winning street furniture “Folding Rundle” – the laser-cut, interactive galvanised steel benches situated down the east end of Rundle Street. After winning the NAG (New Architects and Graduates) Adelaide Design Festival in 2011, Folding Rundle went on to win the 2012 City of Adelaide Prize and People’s Choice Award. Humphries capped off the prize-winning streak by being one of five national winners of the Dulux Study Tour – an ‘intense, amazing and relentless’ global architecture tour, that this years aw them travel to Shanghai, London and Barcelona. Tour showstoppers for Sean were the guided tour of Tate 2 with Herzog De Meuron principals and climbing the spire scaffolds at Gaudi’s epic Sagrada Familia.
To me, they’re both very much proof of something Humphries said during the show: “You get out of it what you put in.”
Hall and Humphries’ already formidable careers are testament to that, and they are an integral part of the design-led change that’s re-shaping Adelaide. These guys are among the architects of tomorrow’s heritage, and the city looks to be in good hands.
John Byleveld is founder of the Plan Radio. He teaches at the Design Studio at Adelaide University, School of Architecture and the Built Environment, and works at Architecture & Design Firm Hames Sharley.
To listen to the Plan podcast, in which Alex Hall and Sean Humphries talk about the challenges of being an emerging architect in Adelaide, just click play below.
