The first in a series of monographs that recognises the work of Australia’s most exciting architectural practices, urban designers and landscape architects.

For over twenty-five years, Kerstin Thompson has explored how architecture can respond to local conditions to positively shape lives and communities. By harnessing the potential for beauty and delight and a sensitivity to landscape, each project resonates with a spirit of generosity and community value.

Kerstin Thompson Architects: Encompassing people and place takes readers on an immersive journey into the very heart of this extraordinary body of work, and documents how, over time, the practice has shifted its focus from individual housing to larger-scale public projects created by a collaborative and talented team. With high-quality images, sketches and drawings selected from Thompson’s archive and discursive texts, this monograph provides a deep insight into not only what architects do – the buildings they make – but also why and how they design.

About the Author

Leon van Schaik AO, LFAIA, LFAA is Emeritus Professor of Architecture at RMIT in Melbourne. He is a widely published writer on architectural culture, promoting it worldwide through the design practice research program that he initiated in 1987. He was awarded the inaugural AIA Neville Quarry Prize for architectural education. In 2006, he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia for his services to architecture and education.

About the Editor

Series editor Dr Fleur Watson is the executive director of and chief curator for the Centre for Architecture Victoria/Open House Melbourne, a not-for-profit organisation that actively engages the public with the agency of good design to positively shape our built environment and communities. Previously, she was curator at Design Hub, an exhibition space dedicated to cross-disciplinary design practice and research at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.

She has held senior curatorial positions in Australia and internationally, including as the founding executive curator of the Lyon Housemuseum Galleries; architecture curator for the National Gallery of Victoria's survey exhibition Melbourne Now (2013/2014); and program curator (architecture) for the European Capital of Culture (Maribor, Slovenia, 2012). In 2010, Fleur co-founded the independent Pin-up Architecture & Design Project Space. Fleur is the author of The New Curator: Exhibiting Architecture & Design (Routledge) and a former editor of Monument magazine.