The Architecture Symposium, Brisbane is a key event of the annual Asia Pacific Architecture Festival (formerly called the Asia Pacific Architecture Forum), bringing together high-profile practitioners from across the region to “explore the innovative thinking and transformative projects creating new world cities for the emerging Asian Century.”
In 2020, the festival will focus on the theme of water. The speakers of the Architecture Symposium, who hail from Indonesia, Thailand, Japan, China, Singapore, New Zealand, India and Australia, will consider our dynamic relationship with water.
Among the speakers addressing the theme is Kotchakorn Voraakhom, CEO and founder of Bangkok-based design practice Landprocess. She said, “Our way of living with water is reflected through architecture and landscape. Thais were once called amphibious. We lived both on land and water. But now our relationship with water has changed. Our modern city infrastructure no longer allows our amphibious nature to flourish.”
Elsewhere, Gurjit Singh Matharoo, principal architect of Matharoo Associates, will consider the bond his practice shares with the Sabarmarti river in Ahmedabad, which flows past the practice’s offices.
Matharoo Associates has produced large-scale public buildings and a number of private residences that were designed with the practice’s “extreme restraint,” inspired by Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn and Mies van der Rohe, as well as the Swiss Tendenza movement. The practice is noted for its use of raw, natural materials and concrete.
Julie Stout, partner at Auckland firm Mitchell Stout Dodd Architects, will discuss a campaign she has led over the past five years questioning the Ports of Auckland’s right to be in the centre of a rapidly growing central city area. Her keynote will explore the historical cultural attitudes of both the Maori and colonizing Europeans to the water, and how an evolving cultural and environmental debate is influencing people’s relationship to their city.
The full line-up includes: Realrich Sjarief, RAW Architecture (Jakarta, Indonesia); Kotchakorn Voraakhom, Landprocess (Bangkok, Thailand); Takeshi Komada, Komada Architects’ Office (Tokyo, Japan); Xu Tiantian, DnA Design and Architecture (Beijing, China); Philip Cox, Cox Architecture (Sydney, Australia); Erik L’Heureux, Pencil Office (Singapore); Julie Stout, Mitchell Stout Dodd Architects and Urban Auckland (Auckland, New Zealand); Gurjit Singh Matharoo, Matharoo Associates (Ahmedabad, India).
To see the full festival program, visit asiapacificarchitecturefestival.com. To purchase tickets to The Architecture Symposium, visit designspeaks.com.au.