Profile: Kerstin Thompson

While the lauded architect has received the highest accolades for her work with her eponymous practice, simple gestures and reasoned thinking still inform her singular approach to the built environment.

I meet Kerstin Thompson AM on the morning she marks 30 years – to the day – of registering her practice, Kerstin Thompson Architects (KTA), now based in North Melbourne on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country. It is generous of her to start this day of all days with an interview, but she is affable and present, even admitting she hasn’t looked at the questions I’d emailed through. “I prefer to start a conversation clear of expectations,” she says. This is also her approach to work – and perhaps life: tabula rasa, assuming nothing, starting from first principles. This relies on active and deep listening, highly prized skills in a profession not commonly known for empathy.

“I don’t really distinguish between a house, a museum or a police station. It’s always about a spatial proposition and intention that I’m most interested in, and the clarity around that thinking.”

Like many architects, Thompson began designing single houses before moving to medium-scale apartments, then civic and cultural projects. As one of Australia’s most recognised and awarded practices, her work ironically lacks the ‘starchitect’ signature style or feature from one typology to the next. “Every project, regardless of size, budget or program, is an opportunity for an idea,” she says. “I don’t really distinguish between a house, a museum or a police station. It’s always about a spatial proposition and intention that I’m most interested in, and the clarity around that thinking.”

In rural Victoria, West Coast House (1998) is an important early project, formative to Thompson’s ideals of weaving a house across its site, around trees and slopes without having to clear and flatten everything “just for architecture to begin”. The house responds topographically, drawing landscape in, with a concertinaed concrete block wall and cedar box that together establish “protected territories” inside the building envelope.

More recent projects explore the relationship between architecture, ecology and environmental systems for flood and fire management integrated in their design, including the Bundanon Project, addressing both flood and fire, plus a series of houses: Guerilla Bay House (2022), Erskine River House (2022) and Sawmills House (2023). In constrained urban settings, Thompson works with different parameters to embed buildings into their surrounds and mitigate environmental harm. Her first multi-residential foray was Napier Street Housing (2001), a cluster of 11 townhouses in Melbourne’s Fitzroy that examines the relationship between the building, the street and its occupants. Through its language of bricks and masonry blockwork, and its combination of warehouse and terrace typology, the project drew upon its neighbours and expressed their interior volumes to the street. “In single housing, a lot of emphasis goes on the finishes and materials, whereas in this project, we focused on the relationships between dwellings in the complex: how we wanted these neighbours to relate and how the dwellings relate to the street and community. How you make a house affects the street; streets make the suburb and suburbs make the city,” she says. “That’s where architects have the most opportunity to make a big impact.”

Recently, two KTA projects received the Best Overend Award at the Victorian Architecture Awards for redefining urban housing. Kerr Street Residences (2023) in Fitzroy challenged heritage norms, integrating a central courtyard within a perimeter block, while Balfe Park Lane (2022) emphasised community-centric design with 77 spacious dwellings, street-level retail and shared green spaces.

In constrained urban settings, Thompson works with different parameters to embed buildings into their surrounds and mitigate environmental harm.

Pursuing a social and environmental agenda for the George Street Residences (2019) saved an ugly duckling brown-brick apartment block from demolition. Thompson replanned its living spaces around an existing north-facing garden, added sliding panels to make second bedrooms multifunctional and rejuvenated the communal front garden to strengthen its street presence. “The question we asked there, and continue to ask, is ‘How much change is needed to support a change in occupation?’ Ideally, you go no further than that, because the most sustainable building is the one you don’t build at all,” she says. This saved not only embodied energy through retention of materials but, critically, retained a cultural memory of place because when you erase buildings, you diminish connection to their stories.

Beside the Shoalhaven River in New South Wales, Bundanon Art Museum and Bridge (2021) – winner of more than 10 local and international awards – shifted Thompson’s thinking dramatically from a picturesque view of landscape and what it looks like to an active one and what it does. Bunkered into the hillside, safe from bushfire, the museum brings the Boyd family legacy to life, while the bridge projects out into the landscape on a steel scaffold, connecting visitors to the site without impeding the flow of floodwaters below.

“It’s acknowledging a series of natural systems and flows that a building can either support or interrupt. That has become an important part of how we work in the practice today.”

“It’s acknowledging a series of natural systems and flows that a building can either support or interrupt. That has become an important part of how we work in the practice today.” Across the bridge, artist residency rooms are frugally finished and not air conditioned, so all the elements can be felt. “The irony of architecture is that to achieve a level of human comfort, we’ve contributed to climate change. I think part of the answer is to broaden our bandwidth for personal discomfort.”

But it’s more about a healthy balance than discomfort for its own sake. At Melbourne’s Holocaust Museum, Highly Commended at the 2023 World Architecture Festival Awards, Thompson asked a different question of comfort. The museum reuses an existing heritage building, stitching its outline into a new facade of lattice brickwork, where apertures of varying density bring light into the building. Is it counterintuitive to look for the bright side in such a solemn place? “I’m always interested in collapsing oppositions; like old and new or beauty and horror,” she says. “There are many precedents for Holocaust museums that manifest discomfort to suggest a horrible set of circumstances. I personally think that diminishes the lessons of the Holocaust, and I don’t think it’s the role of architecture to manifest horror. Instead, we saw the museum as both a memorial to lives lost and a place of hope through education and future change.”

“The irony of architecture is that to achieve a level of human comfort, we’ve contributed to climate change. I think part of the answer is to broaden our bandwidth for personal discomfort.”

Thompson studied at RMIT at a time when architecture in Australia, and Melbourne in particular, was forging a distinct lexicon, based more on rigorous inquiry than tradition. She first worked at Robinson Chen, a Melbourne practice with a construction company, as the go-between from building site to architect’s office. “I learnt about buildability and logistics, materials and labour, and, as it happens, the misfit between a large renderer’s girth and a tall, skinny skylight!”

Since starting her practice in 1994, Thompson has led the profession to encompass houses, schools, museums, galleries and social housing, winning more than 70 awards to date, including two Robin Boyd Awards from the Australian Institute of Architects (AIA). She received an Order of Australia in 2022 for her impact as an architect, advocate and educator, and she holds positions at RMIT and Monash University.

“I’m a ‘pracademic’; I enjoy switching modes from one thing to another,” she says. “I find that teaching and practice inform each other in very useful ways.” The following year, she received the AIA’s highest individual honour, the Gold Medal.

“I find that teaching and practice inform each other in very useful ways.”

Thompson is currently working with Monash University on a new Atlas of Australian Housing and the redevelopment of North Richmond public housing estate as part of the Victorian Government’s Big Housing Build, targeting high environmental design ratings for its 144 new social and affordable homes, with at least five per cent offering all-abilities access.

Reflecting on today’s milestone, Thompson is as resolved as ever in forging a better path forward. A consistently higher-than average gender balance at KTA is just one measure of success. “I started this practice because I was uncomfortable with some of the defaults of conventional practice, including the type of work that women architects were relegated to,” she says. “I was uncomfortable with the split between person and practice mode, work-life imbalance, and I was uncomfortable with some of the myths and behaviours around styles of leadership said to be causative of certain types of great architecture.”

Thompson was drawn into this profession early, traipsing around building sites as a child, in awe of her German mother’s chutzpah. “When she came to Australia aged 17, like a lot of displaced migrants, she found her way into property as a means of building security,” she says. “She worked with my uncle, a self-taught jack-of-all-trades, doing house renovations, so we moved quite a lot as a consequence.

“I started this practice because I was uncomfortable with some of the defaults of conventional practice, including the type of work that women architects were relegated to,” she says.

“And when we moved, Mum could set up a home so quickly, like overnight! Homemaking is such an extraordinary skill, which is either just assumed or not even accounted for much of the time. I’ve thought a lot about that, from a feminist perspective, but also in relation to my practice. Architecture alone is not enough to make a home, it’s about people, connections to place and having your own things, however humble, around you.”

The idea is extended in a later house at Lake Connewarre, where she explores architecture in relation to ecology, “an understanding of the site as part of a greater extended landscape”. Situated on Victoria’s Bellarine Peninsula, the project began in conversation with landscape architect Fiona Harrison, resulting in significant native revegetation of the farmland site. Straddling an escarpment, the linear building’s folded roofline references the wings of the black swans for which Lake Connewarre is named, rising and falling to expand and compress the views from within.

Reflecting on today’s milestone, Thompson is as resolved as ever in forging a better path forward.