Up From Down Under.(Glenn Murcutt)(Brief Article)(Interview)

This week the jury of the 2002 Pritzker Prize--known as the Nobel of architecture--announced the honor will go to Glenn Murcutt. Glenn who? In years past the $100,000 prize has been snagged by such global design stars as Frank Gehry and Rem Koolhaas. Murcutt, 66, who works alone from his home in a Sydney suburb, mostly designs houses and has never built anything outside his native Australia. But architecture buffs know him for his inventive modernist designs--which owe a debt to both Mies van der Rohe and the Aussie sheep shed--and for the way his buildings fit their natural surroundings. He was into ecological design long before it was fashionable. NEWSWEEK's Cathleen McGuigan reached him in St. Louis, Missouri, where he was teaching a 10-day architecture course at Washington University.

What are the principles of your design work?

First, it's trying to understand the junction of a client's aspirations, a client's budgetary constraints and the site, and then trying to understand the place that site is occupying on this planet. You try to understand everything from geology to topography, the soil, the flora, the prevailing breezes, erosion. Then you think about space, light and prospect, about the structure, materials. You think about the cultural landscape and the natural landscape, to understand the imposition of the human on that land. And you design with serenity in mind.

You've never built outside Australia. How come?

Well, you see, unlike people of the world, who clearly know what every culture is like, I don't. You've got to live in a country to understand it.

And in working alone, a choice I made years ago, one doesn't have the capacity.

Yet you travel widely, to lecture and teach. Which architects and buildings have had the biggest influence on you?