Profile: Sean Godsell

From Europe to North America, the Melbourne architect has captured attention and renown for his highly responsive, site-minded approach to residential design and innovative public spaces.

Singular. Complex. Uncompromising. Sean Godsell’s pursuit of purity and a higher purpose in even the humblest of briefs has both beguiled and baffled the critics. His architecture is of a sensory nature, blending material craft with monastic austerity. He wants us to not simply observe the elements but to feel them.

“I think houses should be invigorating environments, where the thermal comfort range is much broader than, say, an office, so you can understand the heat of the day and really appreciate the cool of the day,” says Godsell on his design philosophy.

Over four decades, Sean Godsell Architects has amassed dozens of accolades, from the Victorian Premier’s Design Award and Robin Boyd Award (twice) to Italy’s Barbara Cappochin Biennale Award and Chicago Athenaeum Award. A highlight is a Papal Silver Medal in 2018 for his ‘Pavilion of the Holy See’, the first exhibition by Vatican City at the Venice Architecture Biennale. He was also deservedly awarded the Gold Medal in 2022, the Australian Institute of Architects’ highest honour.

Godsell likes to shake things up, to push us out of our comfort zone.

This year, Godsell was invited to Harvard University to teach a fall semester studio for a dozen hopeful architecture graduates, selected by ballot. His topic – resilience in the face of climate crisis – couldn’t be more timely. Godsell likes to shake things up, to push us out of our comfort zone. “We chose Broken Hill, NSW, as an interesting outback location to set the task of designing under the scenario that the planet has warmed up as it’s predicted,” he says. “It’ll be interesting to see how their designs might differ from today’s. And how would they be future-proofed for Broken Hill to continue operating as a viable town.”

In Melbourne’s Kew, Godsell’s own home is composed of a single space divided by sliding panels. A rectangle of oxidised steel, 18 metres long by nine metres wide, Kew House cantilevers 5.5 metres over a steep embankment. The bedrooms are to the south and an open living space to the north, where a seven-metre-long in-built kitchen table is the fulcrum of family life, an altar to Australian domesticity. Hovering above, as if tethered rather than anchored, it is screened with operable shutters in the same rust-coloured steel. “This shade skin of industrial walkway grating is inspired by the French architect Jean Nouvel and became a precursor to more rigorous research into the verandah,” says Godsell.

His research brings together two opposing regional expressions of the verandah – the Australian vernacular, where they wrap protectively around a house providing shelter and shade, mediating indoor and outdoor temperatures, and the Japanese tradition where the verandah is a transition space, unprogrammed yet functional.

Sean Godsell’s pursuit of purity and a higher purpose in even the humblest of briefs has both beguiled and baffled the critics.

In the Carter/Tucker House, a beach weekender for photographer Earl Carter and his partner, Wanda Tucker, Godsell inverted the verandah, internalising unprogrammed, fluid space and distilling a shade skin of western red cedar. “The shutters are operated by the owners, filling and emptying the space with light,” says Godsell. “In keeping with the bush mechanic spirit, the shutters – operated by ropes and pulleys – are supported using the same gas struts you find on hatchback cars.”

In the later St Andrews Beach House and Glenburn House, Godsell divided and physically separated the public and private realms. “To enter the private realms of these houses, one has to go outside and back inside again, bracing the elements as an essential part of habitation. I think it’s a regenerative gesture. Given both are weekend houses, their role is, in part, to rehumanise their owners after a week of office-bound living.”

Sean Godsell was born in Melbourne in 1960. His father, David Godsell, was an architect and acolyte of the American modernist Frank Lloyd Wright. In the bayside suburb of Beaumaris, David designed the family home very much in the spirit of Wright, earning it nomination for heritage protection in the early 21st century. Godsell’s mother and older sisters were models, and his younger brother Chris would also become an architect. Before practicing architecture, Godsell played AFL for St Kilda, until injury prematurely ended his football career.

Over four decades, Sean Godsell Architects has amassed dozens of accolades, from the Victorian Premier’s Design Award and Robin Boyd Award (twice) to Italy’s Barbara Cappochin Biennale Award and Chicago Athenaeum Award.

While studying, he worked in the office of Edmond and Corrigan, architects of Melbourne’s postmodern icons RMIT’s Building 8 and Southbank’s VCA Theatre. After university, Godsell took the architect’s grand tour to Japan and Europe, where he worked in London with Sir Denys Lasdun, the Brutalist architect of London’s National Theatre building. “It was a great office full of huge talents. I was by far the youngest person there when I joined,” he fondly recalls.

Returning to Australia, Godsell established his architectural firm in 1994, completing his Masters of Architecture at RMIT in 1999. While he chose architecture over football, the latter, he says, was formative to his temperament in the former. “Football is all about stamina, you’ve just got to keep going, there’s no alternative … sport also teaches a lot about life, and if you know about life, you know how to be an architect.”

While in awe of the masters Le Corbusier and Michelangelo, he would instead ground his practice deeply and defiantly in the Antipodean condition, inspired by the stoicism of colonists who battled a hostile new landscape, material limitations and the tyranny of distance.

Unlike his father, Godsell didn’t pursue architecture in yearning for foreign lands. While in awe of the masters Le Corbusier and Michelangelo, he would instead ground his practice deeply and defiantly in the Antipodean condition, inspired by the stoicism of colonists who battled a hostile new landscape, material limitations and the tyranny of distance.

An architect of global repute today, Godsell still runs a small studio in Fitzroy with Hayley Franklin, whom he inducted as a third-year student, and who, 27 years later, describes her tenure as “a traditional atelier- style mentorship that has allowed me to evolve into the architect I am. We have a close collaboration and a shared commitment to design excellence, making the work continually challenging, engaging and fulfilling.”

In 2018, Godsell won his second Robin Boyd Award for House on the Coast, situated on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula. One leg of this fine, L-shaped building cantilevers away from its sloping site, projecting out towards the adjoining national park and Bass Strait beyond. Just as with Kew House, it hovers over the landscape, veiled with adjustable screens. Unlike Kew, it includes a digital interface between the building and its occupants, with operating systems all remote-controlled by phone – the garden irrigation, façade screens and security, pool heating, lighting, entertainment systems and solar cell/battery data collection – allowing the owners to tap in wherever they are.

Together with site orientation that optimises natural light and airflow, plus the hard-wired infrastructure of solar panels and rainwater harvesting, the home is a highly attuned and responsive resident of the site. A mechanical entity, Godsell calls it a “device for living with”, an evolution of his modernist hero, Le Corbusier’s ‘machine for living in’. Godsell’s, however, is a different kind of modernism, more rational, perhaps fatalistic.

“I’ve always described architecture as a battle with nature that architects can never win because, in the end, nature always wins. Buildings simply interrupt the landscape for a moment. Ultimately, nature takes the building back.”

“I think houses should be invigorating environments, where the thermal comfort range is much broader than, say, an office, so you can understand the heat of the day and really appreciate the cool of the day,” says Godsell on his design philosophy.