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Interview with Adam Russell, Principal of VIM Design, Sydney
What do
you do?
Loosely I am an architect and I run a small architectural practice. Projects
wise, we've got a mixture of urban housing, multi-unit housing, and single
houses. If I had to choose a word it'd be housing.
What drew you to study architecture?
I used to walk to a friend's house on the way to high school. He lived on the Lane Cove river in a boat shed. The house was just inspiring. It was just a beautiful timber structure that almost hung over the river and we used to sit there and drink tea for half an hour before we went to school. His father, Tony Coote, was practicing as an architect and worked from home and it struck me as an ideal lifestyle. It was probably the only calm in my life at that time.
I was really into drawing right through school and I guess I thought naively that architecture was only drawing. I guess it is in some ways, as Eoghan would attest - drawing the realness out of life, and not just in the physical sense of drawing.
What is your background and training?
I studied at UTS part-time for 6 years and worked for two practices during that time. The first was a large practice McConnell Smith and Johnson, who did hospitals and schools. Then I worked for Order Architects - Kim Crestani for the last 3 years. We mainly did housing. Yeah, definitely studying part-time was a key element in my training. I learnt a lot working in the offices that I worked in. It gave a really clear picture of what being an architect was about really early on.
Was it what you expected?
No it wasn't what I expected from school days dreaming what you're going to be when you grow up. What it ended up being, I was interested in and enjoyed. I couldn't imagine doing anything else.
When did you start VIM Design?
When I graduated, I went overseas for a year and a half, and travelled Europe for 6 months in a combi van with some mates. We chased all the buildings that we had studied throughout our studies and we explored them and discovered them in the flesh, worked out whether we really liked them or not. Then I worked in England for a year for a big firm on some pretty average jobs. That was really good fun, getting to know London intimately. And then I came back here and worked for Stanisic Turner for 3 years then as associate with Stanisic Associates for a year. I was more interested in pursuing the little projects I had on the side than the stress of managing so many people in the office and that led to resigning from there and starting a practice on the strength of 3 small private jobs.
Is it hard to do - starting your own practice?
It wasn't essential to do it but there was no other option that I was remotely interested in. I just really couldn't face working for somebody, for any other practice in Sydney at the time. I guess I needed to test myself. I thought there were compromises in the places I was working in. They weren't the sort of practices that I'd ideally want to be working in. That lead me to think well maybe I could make the practice that I would ideally like to be working in.
So have you now built the type of practice you'd ideally like to be working in?
I knew you'd ask that. I think we're a lot broader in our approach, not as structured and we actively chase projects that we wouldn't normally have walk in the door. Definitely doing more theoretic work through competitions, and we are probably more integrated with teaching.
So they're
passion related projects rather than just commercial driven ones?
Yeah, although as it turns out the bigger you get the more commercially
astute you need to be. You need the engine to do the good stuff and to
have the engine you need to keep it well greased and oiled and that's
a challenge.
Do you see yourself wanting to pursue larger and larger projects or are you happy to do competitions and projects that interest you at the time?
I'm interested in the larger projects. I think at heart I'm an urban person rather than a detail person which is not to say that I'm not enthralled by greatly detailed buildings. I'm just not really good at them. Being interested in urban stuff generally draws you to working on bigger projects. At the scale we are now, we find we're collaborating a lot with other practices who either have the grunt or the contacts or they recognise that there's experience and qualities that we have that enable us to add value to the given project.
So do people usually come to you or is it both ways?
Both ways. A lot of it is really intertwined with the greater social and cultural network of architects and designers I think. In social situations you sort of hear about opportunities, you hear about a competition or a project and it's often friends or friends of friends and that ends up turning in a more serious commercial situation.
What does VIM mean?
I found it in a dictionary one day reading the dictionary, and it means energy and vitality and integrity and strength. It's often coupled with vigour. English colloquial. V. I. M. doesn't stand for anything. I didn't want to work under my name because I felt that was really too exclusive. It wouldn't allow things to change rapidly, the structure to change, people to come and go.
Who or what are the sources of inspiration in your work and life?
I think living in Sydney is a really big inspiration. I live in the inner west and work here (Paddington) and spend most of my time somewhere in between the two. Getting out of Sydney as well, getting out into the bush, hitting the coast - I find it really inspiring.
So what are some of your favourite buildings in Australia, overseas and why?
I might start with overseas. Recently, I travelled on a bit of a whirlwind trip you might say. Visiting the UK, Italy and Japan. The highlight for me from the work side was Tokyo and my favourite, most inspiring times in Tokyo were the complete chaos of infrastructure and culture and commerce and people and technology. It was just incredible, a melting pot of all those things, completely unselfconscious. It was just an occurrence. And I found that really interesting, so more highly developed than being here. There was also a very strong sense of personal space there even though it was so dense and tense.
So it was more the culture of Japan rather than any specific buildings overseas?
There were a few buildings I visited. A housing project by Shigeru Ban that I quite liked . It took me an hour and a half to get to it. I thought I was heading out of Tokyo but when I got there it was just as dense as where I'd come from.
We had a weekend at Riversdale down on the Shoalhaven river. The Murcutt, Lewin, Lark building was fantastic. It was an amazing building on an amazing site and yeah quite inspiring. In our studio we had this debate on favourite buildings and decided listing a top ten is just impossible. You can go to the great ten but then there's also the really small, humble almost invisible spaces and buildings that are also incredible. They work on a completely different level.
So what draws you to a building and makes you go Wow!?
Definitely the way it's inhabited and the way or the way it can be inhabited. I guess a sense of private and public, and in between operability. A building that can open up or close down or one that you can customise to suit. The Riversdale building was completely operable - lots of sliding walls. You can divide a room of 4 beds into 2 with a wall to cut it down the middle and the whole window system had a small area of glass. It didn't use much heat but then on a nice day there were huge timber panels that opened up and gave you a sense of a huge opening, and within those timber panels there were these little vents that were mosquito screens. So at night you could have them shut but still have the vents open. Things like that where you can make a place your own. It doesn't lose anything of its design integrity but it can be really customised for a certain gathering of people or a certain type of person.
So what type of projects does your firm do?
Oh. Alts and Adds. (Laughs). We've got a fairly broad mixture of housing projects on at the moment from a top secret round about 300 dwelling mixed use apartment building that we're working on with two other offices that I can't tell you more about. We've also got a couple of clients that we're doing small scale mixed use apartment buildings with up to 20 dwellings. We've got a couple of very low budget houses to be built on very difficult sites with flooding and expressways but in a nice suburb so it's just really challenging: low budget, complex site, difficult council. And then a whole lot of alterations and additions, small houses that we're adding up to ½ a million dollars worth of work to.
So how do you market your services or how do those people find you?
All sorts of different ways. People who have known me prior to VIM. We'll just see each other somewhere. Usually the bigger work comes from experience I've had before VIM. There's some work that's two years old now and there's a bit of repeat work coming from clients that we've done work with over those two years, which is really good.
I come from a big family and all my brothers and sisters have friends and connections and a lot of the smaller work comes from friends associated with family. There's also work coming from people I've known for 20 years in Hunters Hill, which is where I grew up. But definitely the best work is from repeat clients, clients we've had who are happy with the service we have provided and our approach. They come back and recommend us.
Do you actively market?
No not really. Haven't needed to actively market. I mean if we get ear of a potential project and we know the people involved we'll ring up and say hello, how's it going, just heard about this job and it's the kind of stuff we're really interested in. How how do you market an architectural practice? What do you do? You don't really put an ad in the classifieds. A lot of magazines are only read by other architects.
So how did you become a part of the Sydney Central Team?
That's an interesting one. I worked on the original competition when I was working for Stanisic Associates and we submitted the competition entry following which I resigned. A week before I left after giving my month's notice we heard that we won the competition and Frank Stanisic kindly offered half of his component to Vim and that was a really good start to building up the practice. It was pretty much 6 month's worth of work, 50% of my time and it's also led to other work I think. People have seen my involvement in that and I guess it gives them a bit of confidence in us doing bigger work.
So were you responsible for entering that competition?
I did a lot of work on the Stanisic side of things. We were only 1/3 of the primary consultant group, primary design group and there were a whole lot of other peripheral consultants as well.
So how does that collaboration work?
It's very complex and quite unstructured at times too. A lot of discussion and beers around the table and 'fat' pens out and we visited the site quite a bit. There's a fair bit of research involved too. I was looking at the census statistics for the whole region and trying to get an understanding of what was really there beyond Parramatta Rd itself. Other people were looking at precedence overseas, all sorts of urban renewal projects. We'd all come together and present our different research elements and try to draw conclusions from that. But our general approach really reflected the way we worked as well so the submission that we made was quite a chaotic document and approached the issues from all sorts of different angles. It wasn't a clean solution.
So where is it at now?
It's apparently sitting on the shelf of Planning NSW because it's considered politically too sensitive.
Why?
There's been a lot of talk in the papers recently about new land release on the fringes of Sydney, and one of our key funding elements and also place making elements is to introduce a lot more housing along the road on grey field sites. We quickly came to the realisation that it was actually a piece of prime real estate in Sydney that was completely under-utilised. There were already trains, ferries, buses, schools that had not enough people attending because there wasn't a population right there on the road. We proposed to add up to half a million in population along that 23 kilometres of roadway and that was very controversial - the idea of increasing density and population. Politically that was seen as potentially offending a lot of people and therefore something a politician wouldn't really support because it affects their votes. Not in my backyard sort of response. People see it now and think it's busy and overcrowded with too many cars and too much there already. I think we were proposing changes that perhaps reduce intensity of vehicle movement but increase density of people movement and that was a difficult concept for many people to support.
How do you approach a project?
Usually by getting to know the site and the client and the brief so I guess there's a research phase, which sometimes involves drawings and discussion with clients. Usually a client will come to you and say I want something done but I have no idea what I really want so there's this untangling of their lives, what they can afford, if it's a family, are they expecting kids or are they working at home.
If it's a larger project, there are market issues that sometimes clients aren't too aware of. We really just try and collect all of the influences and site information of the project and then make sense of those, and find a direction through that. Increasingly, we're starting to look at materials early on like this big project we're looking at now - we're starting to define parts of the building through the materials that put them together and almost working from the other way. It's like saying this is the material we want to use in this part of the building and the building is starting to be shaped by the material as well as by all those brief and site issues.
Can you outline the process from research to the final outcome?
Every job's different. With domestic clients, sometimes clients will um and ah about things for so long that they won't make a final decision on a bathroom layout for a couple of months and their situations change all the time as well. With one client, we've had for 2 years on a house in Leichhardt Council. They got engaged, married, had a kid and the work we've been doing for them hasn't started on site yet. Their situation's changed so much in that period. There's been so much going on in their lives that the process has been really drawn out. But then there are other clients who have financial reasons to go fast on projects and they're much more focused on meeting deadlines.
So does your work have a particular theme or philosophical approach?
Contextual modernism? [an MVRDV term], where an understanding of place and the site and the people that use the site is approached in a rational modernist way. It's not about a graphic or iconic idea that is forced onto the scheme. It's not about having a moment of insight and applying one idea and forcing everything to fit that idea.
Do you see architecture as a problem solving process or a creative process?
I think it's both. I think if you can't get the basic problem solving stuff sorted out then it can't be architecture. But I think it needs to go very much beyond that to be good architecture. There's a right way and a wrong way to do things. I guess it comes down to not the physical quality of the building but the experiential, the emotive and the spatial quality.
So when you do a project, do you look at all the requirement parameters and then add the 'design' components in?
No. I think with every decision you make, you consider it for its design merits. What is design is the question isn't it? It's definitely the function, the joy and the beauty, the experience and every decision you make - whether it's a structural system or laying out a bathroom or stuff that seems quite mundane - you consider it for its potential to be beautiful or moving, to stir the senses.
Do you do that with materials and colours?
Everything. Materials, colours, spatial relationships, connections between inside and out. We're always thinking: Where is someone going to sit in this room? Are you going to sit here and feel like you're almost outside or are you going to sit here and feel warm and cosy but you look through another space? Things like circulation - we always try and turn into an experience. It's not just a stair in the corner of the house, but perhaps it's a little view that's opened up as the person uses the stair and it suddenly becomes a moment you acknowledge in your day-to-day use of the house.
So what tools do you use in your design work?
A Lamy pen, my sketchbook, which I carry everywhere I go and it has all sorts of things in it like drawings and lists. I use a computer quite a bit.
What software do you use?
We use Vectorworks, Artlantis [a 3D rendering package], and Photoshop. They're probably the 3 main design packages. I love my G4 Titanium laptop. It never leaves my side. But there's also a hell of a lot of printing, hand drawing over the top of computer work. I mean there are drawings which begin their life as a 3D computer model, printed out with more detail drawn over the top in pencil and then that pencil drawing is scanned with colour applied in Photoshop. So there's this almost seamless process of going in and out of the computer system and I think somehow it brings a bit of texture and life to the images produced using the computer.
So it's not so technical and cold, it's more kind of dynamic?
When clients see something produced on a computer, they have a sense of it being final and complete, like it's almost without fault because it's come out of a computer, and without flexibility. So working with pencil and pen and then working it back into the computer helps keep it loose.
Is entering competitions important and why?
Very important. They're an opportunity to take leaps and bounds in your thinking and I guess address concerns that are very difficult to address with fee-paying clients who have deadlines and budgets and specific briefs. Competitions give us an opportunity to work on projects that are of a nature or scale that we don't usually work on. The two competitions we recently entered were international competitions so you find yorself working in a broader design community and with issues beyond Sydney and Australia, and I quite enjoy that as well. It's almost like travelling.
Do you think using architects services' is out of the price range of most people?
I think it's a big problem.
How does that get addressed?
It's really difficult. I often tell clients when they question fees that I believe we're trying to create smaller buildings hence saving them money but smaller buildings that are much more liveable and functional. There's no wasted space and they should consider the extension to their house as being something that's not just adding square metres but adding a whole lot of more valuable things.
So do you have an interest in community housing and other projects?
We've looked at some community housing projects in the last couple of years that haven't really taken off. Yeah it's an area that we haven't had a great deal of experience in but I'm very conscious of producing work that's not exclusive to those with money, using materials and finishes that are cheap but using them in a very considered way and I think that could be directly applied to community housing which never has a good budget but has very specific needs that are far more tangible than the need for a wealthy couple to have a 5th bedroom and a swimming pool at the back of their house. So I'd definitely be interested in pursuing that type of work.
Is it architects that do that type of work?
Sadly I think a lot of the stuff that's done in Sydney is not. I keep thinking of the Netherlands when you talk about community housing where mass social housing is often government funded or government co-managed with private enterprise. There's been a real conscious effort in the Netherlands to use architects and their housing is very rich and customised and personalised, it has an identity and is high quality.
Where do you think Sydney housing should be headed?
I think it will become denser. I think suburbia's got a lot to answer for. I have had no great experience with it but the idea of the front yard is a really flawed concept and I think it's a gross waste of land and resources and it's also quite an anti-social concept.
I also question Sydney's population, and whether it should keep growing or whether country towns should repopulate. I think new population focus should be put into country towns with better connections to Sydney so that there's a greater cross-connectivity of information, technology and culture and. Rebirth of the country town could be a successful way to deal with growth.
So how do you get high density living then?
Well you look at a city like Paris. There is a diagram we did for Parramatta Rd. We tried to convince people that high density living doesn't mean more shadows, more lift access, more multi-storey buildings. Tokyo averages 71 persons per hectare. Sydney has 20 persons per hectare. A city like Paris where buildings are around 6-8 storeys high, is more than double Sydney's density but people think of Paris as a place they really love. Look at Paddington - which is probably 2-3 times as dense as Sydney's average but it doesn't mean excessive shadows, walking up more stairs or huge buildings with lifts.
What do you see as the role of councils and planning departments?
When you talk about local councils, there are two sides to council. There are the trained staff planning officers and the like who suggest they know what they are doing and who, rarely have any design training, and then there are the elected council who for some reason have veto over any decision made by a planning officer. I think that's a very flawed planning structure.
What's the solution?
Elected Council shouldn't have the final say in what happens in their suburb. Also when a proposed development or modification to a building is advertised to the neighbours, it isn't advertised as a series of reduced sized drawings that is posted out with no commentary because most neighbours out there don't understand building developments, they don't understand growth in the city, and change. The planner should advertise their preliminary planning report. So the resident receives the draft report explaining the council codes [that the elected council have put in place] and explaining how the development meets the codes or responds to the codes. Then all the residents understand exactly what's going on and they understand whether the development is fully complying or not. I think that could improve things a little.
Do you think new buildings should be designed in the context of the existing heritage?
Heritage is a strange concept. Whenever I come up in front of a heritage architect I tell them that I'm intending to produce the best heritage for tomorrow. I say that what we're trying to do a building which is about contemporary issues and materials, and something that we would hope will be valued by the community in 50 years time as part of their own heritage, but to imitate or mock something that has gone in the past is really degrading the value that it once had. That's not to say you shouldn't be reverent to a building that has specific qualities. I don't think you should design in complete ignorance of heritage.
What are your plans for VIM Design for the next 3-5 years and beyond?
There are a few in the ideal world. I reckon I'd love to have enough people to do a public building well, a larger project and do it well. So I think maybe 6 people in total would be a pretty good critical mass of people working on projects and give us the flexibility to do the large and still do the small. Definitely try and get into more public buildings, more multi-use. We find that in designing housing the biggest spaces we get to design are living rooms of 6m x 4m. I'd really like to explore some larger spaces in the future.. Not interested office towers. I'm not a big fan of the tower. I like being connected to the ground. I'm scared of lifts.
Do you see yourself always being an architect?
I'll always be an architect whatever I end up doing.
What does independence mean to you?
Independence.
I guess it means freedom to me. Decisions like what projects we do and
what we don't. Freedom to move. I'm struggling with being independent
yet financially viable, of being sustainable.
There's something about a small practice which allows you to be more independent
because you can, inevitably you collaborate more. Eoghan, for example
comes on and off different projects and we work together on projects but
we also have months where we don't work together and that sort of ability
to rely on each other, but also to remain independent is nice. I think
being a practice of 100 people, you'd feel like things are moving slowly
if they changed at all. I think we have the ability to change and adapt
much faster.
What are some of your favourite websites and design magazines?
I like Butterpaper because it feels very thinly spread and open. It has access to all aspects of architecture and design related issues without being really regimented. Most of my greatest numbers of hits websites are sites like Yellow Pages, Whereis or Dictionary.com and other really functional ones. There are a few that I occasionally go back to - designers or artists doing stuff on the web. I like the therevolution.com.au. I find their website quite inspiring. They do all sort of graphic, web, and curatory projects. They organise fashion exhibitions. They did a website for Nelson Mandela where they first made a short film which earned enough money to fund the website structure. They're really inventive and productive in the way they move through life and get work. I was really into some of the Telemetry Orchestra site a while ago. They're an electronic music group in Sydney. I think their day jobs are web-based design, audio, and interactive web stuff.
What do you do apart from architecture?
I sleep and I eat. Architecture's boundaries are so blurred, it's really hard. I ride my bicycle and I surf. They're my recreational activities and also my mind relief. I've been doing a bit of renovating lately which is quite architectural. (Laughs). A bit of cooking, ……
Email: adam@vimdesign.com.au
Web: http://www.vimdesign.com.au
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