It’s a family affair. MvS Architects Director Jan van Schaik is a third generation architect, and that’s a lineage that also includes art – which all three generations studied before undertaking degrees in architecture. He sat down with Architecture & Design’s Digital Editor Clémence Carayol to talk about the genesis of WAMA and the impacts of good architecture on the environment, and vice versa.

Architecture & Design: Can you describe the initial vision for this project and how it evolved over time?

Jan van Schaik: The vision for this project is for a world-class public museum of environmental art situated within 16 hectares of woodlands, wetlands and botanic gardens in the foothills of Gariwerd, otherwise known as the Grampians.

The project is a passion project of a driven and generous philanthropist couple, who have amassed a dedicated community of volunteers, donated the land for the project to Trust for Nature, provided a third of the project’s funding, and established the foundation that is now the client.

I first became involved in the project in 2015 when undertaking a masterplan for tourism development in Halls Gap in 2014. The project is due to open to the public around April 2025, by which time I will have been working on the project for a little over a decade.

Over that time the vision for the project has remained unchanged, while the scale of the project, the structure of the client body, and the timelines did. And these are the types of changes that one would expect from a project that is progressing from an idea, through the forming of a foundation, securing funding, design, and then construction.

One of the key moment’s in the project's development was the commissioning of a business case which enabled the project to secure Victorian State Government funding and be designed to a brief that aligned to its long term financial stability. This really helped concentrate the ambitions for the project around demand for visitation, which helped stablise the brief, and defined how much capital funding could legitimately be raised.

The building that will open next year is the third of three dramatically different versions that were designed for the project – and likely not the last.

WAMA overview from the west. Artist impression courtesy of MvS Architects and TAUT/supplied.

What were the biggest challenges you faced during the design and construction phases, and how did you overcome them?

The greatest challenges were designing to a dramatically shifting capital budget, managing the client expectations about how far the construction budget could be stretched, and maintaining a consistent design response as the structure of the foundation matured.

How did you ensure that the project met the client’s needs and expectations?

Ensuring that the project met the clients needs and expectations required two parallel, and often intertwined processes taking place at the same time.

One the one hand, we listened closely to exactly what it was that the client needed – and as the client is made up of many people, and advised by many others, all of whom brought all sorts of different types of knowledge and experience to the project, this was in itself not straightforward.

And on the other hand we played a role in helping the client understand their own needs, and manage their expectations. These two processes were managed through iterative design proposals, and by navigating a series of interrelated relationships. Ultimately, whether we have in fact succeeded at this can only be known once the project opens – so watch this space.

Were there any unique or innovative techniques or materials used in this project?

This project uses proven and dependable techniques, some of them in unusual ways – such as the laminated beams along the building's main internal axis, the graphic brick pattern at the entry, and oversizing of the columns holding up the gull-wing roof.

That said, while these techniques are not common, they are by no means original. The innovation of this project lies in the concentration of the project's resources on the gallery space. This has ensured that WAMA has an exceptionally large exhibition space for a regional gallery, 400m2, with world class climate control and security which will enable it to host large exhibitions of an international standard in a spectacular remote setting.

And the plan of the gallery has a unique and unusual plan-shape. It is long enough that emergency exit doors are required at both ends. To ensure that these doors do not interrupt the hanging space of the gallery’s 5m walls, the southern end of the plan has a hammer-head formation within which the doors are concealed.

That these hammer-head recesses reach the full height of the gallery creates a sense that the southern internal wall of the gallery is infinitely wide, and an illusion of scale designed to move visitors to question their own importance in the larger scheme of the environment – a question that WAMA is particularly invested in.

How does this project fit into your broader portfolio and design philosophy?

WAMA, like many of our projects, is architecture in a sensitive environment that is also about that environment. The devastation of natural environments that has taken place globally over the last one hundred years has, in part, gone unchallenged because of the fact that we understand ourselves as separate from nature.

In fact, we are totally dependent upon the natural environment, and part of it. In the WAMA project the natural environment, and a fundamental component of what it means to be human – the making of art – are brought together in one project. Bringing these two interests together in one project, WAMA has progressed our broader philosophy.

And while our contractual relationship to the project is nearing its end, I expect that we will remain very involved in the project as it starts this next and important phase of opening to the public. And as it develops over the next decade, and beyond, hopefully I will grow as well.

WAMA project plans/supplied.

Let’s take a look at your career: who is Jan van Schaik?

There are many answers to that question. In this context, I am a registered architect with a solid career already under my belt. I am a third-generation architect, and that’s a lineage that also includes art – which all three generations studied before undertaking degrees in architecture.

As I pay taxes and vote in Melbourne I am proud to consider myself part of the representational democracy of Australia, yet I take the view that affiliation with any national identity is a bankrupt and damaging idea. My architecture practice is informed by an architectural dialogue particular to Melbourne, and also by the architectural dialogues of other locals in which I work, have visited, and lived.

Also relevant to his context is my work in tertiary education, where I apply my experience in practice to the teaching of undergraduate students and the supervision of PhD candidates. My work with undergraduate students is focussed on exposing students to a range of ideas and pedagogies, helping them learn how to experiment, encouraging them to build collegiality, and teaching them how to design through iteration.

I think these are the hardest things to teach, and learning how to experiment is very difficult when faced with the constraints of an actual project. As a PhD supervisor I help established architects, and artists, identify the tacit knowledge in their own work and articulate it to a point where it can withstand independent doctoral examination – and in a way that de-necessitates them becoming academics, and in turn super-charges their practices.

What inspired you to pursue a career in architecture, and how has your perspective changed since you began?

I was not inspired to pursue my career. I fell into it. I enrolled to study architecture in order to escape a vocational, high-school equivalent, art course that I was resisting – like I had resisted every other year of school up to that point.

A resistance that I am proud of, as secondary school education is a learning environment which is very well suited to some but is not designed to incentivise those not aligned to its methods to thrive. I had intended to take one year of an architecture degree, thereby securing my secondary-school certificate, and then leave.

However, I was surprised to find not only that I enjoyed studying architecture, but that I excelled at it – and discovered that study and work can be deeply rewarding and a joy. Both these feelings persist, and through this found interest in architecture, I found a way to thrive.

Can you discuss a project or moment in your career that significantly shaped your approach to architecture and design?

There’s no one moment. I think the practice of architecture is dependent on the type of knowledge and experience that builds incrementally over time – knowledge that is made up of a breadth of general knowledge, a complex network of industry relationships, and a habit of keeping yourself informed.

Key moments that have informed these for me are the people I studied under and with from whom I learned the habits of discourse – and where the idea of the original, or singular, genius in architecture was debunked.

Working for Ashton Raggatt McDougall as an undergraduate, and after graduating, I learned about systems, workflow, and how the business of architecture worked – yet my work there was limited to a small range of tasks.

And then working for small practice I learned how terribly inefficient working on a series of differentiated small projects can be, yet was able to work on every single part of a project – and found that what I’d learned while working at Ashton Raggatt McDougall was only of use at Ashton Raggatt McDougall. I left after nine years to become a director of MvS Architects.

With the benefit of hindsight, I should have left four years earlier. However, during those four years I designed one of the buildings that I am most proud to have worked on – the ATO offices on the corner of Queen and Albert Street in Brisbane, by Ashton Raggatt McDougall.

Perhaps the most formative, and enjoyable, shift in my career was becoming a director of Minifie Nixon Architects (MNA) in 2007, which later became MvS Architects. I did so on the back of a competition that MNA won to design a 12 storey, 1200m2 floor plate building for Grocon on the old Cartlon United Brewery site.

Six months into the design of the project the 2008 financial crash happened and the project was terminated, leaving me as a co-director of a business with no work-flow, and no prospective clients. I’ve enjoyed every day of work since I started my own business in spite of the roller coaster ride that it is. Or perhaps because of it.

How do you stay current with architectural trends and technologies (such as AI for instance)?

In addition to the required professional development, I learn from my peers and students. And my staff. And to the extent that our office contributes to new trends and technologies, which I’d like to think it does, we share it back. Artificial Intelligence is very interesting, and very powerful. It’s merely a tool whose mechanics are somewhat opaque – even to those who have designed it. Whether it equates to intelligence depends on what your definition of intelligence is – and perhaps the most useful thing that AI has taught us so far is that an agreed definition of intelligence does not exist.

It seems like a lot of people are using it in practice, all the while thinking that they’re alone in doing so. I mention this as I think it’s important to keep up with current technologies, but also to understand the implications of their development. While learning about how to use Artificial Intelligence in practice, I have also done a lot of reading on its implications on society at large. What I am saying is that keeping abreast of trends and technologies is not of much use without keeping abreast of art, politics, culture, economics, science and society.

What role do you think sustainability plays in modern architecture, and how do you incorporate it into your work?

It’s a difficult question to answer as it’s critical to say that sustainability is important – because it is. Yet sustainable practice in architecture is very easy to promise, and very hard to achieve. This makes most statements about sustainable practice seem hollow – which is consistent with the fact that the dramatic increased global awareness about sustainability over the last two decades has coincided with a dramatic global increase in use of fossil fuels. This means that there is an extraordinary abundance of green-washing in all industries.

The principle of a total carbon negative design drives the work of our practice. There is no evidence that any architectural practice in the world has achieved this, yet we persist in presenting to our clients the full complexity of delivering a carbon negative footprint on each project to enable them to balance the upfront costs to individuals, and long term benefits to society, of total carbon negative design.

This approach ensures that claims to sustainable design are only made after fully expanding the parameters of the metrics of sustainability to the full extent of the supply chain of every component of design and construction. And when there has been an appetite to absorb the upfront costs of sustainable technologies, our projects have received the highest awards for sustainable design.

What advice would you give to young architects just starting their careers?

Put a sign on your door saying ‘open for business’.

How does art articulate itself with architecture in your career?

In addition to being an architect I am also an artist and art collector. Both of these practices are hangovers from my upbringing and early education. As with architecture, they arise from being embedded in the communities of other makers and collectors.

I take my own art practice very seriously, in spite of the fact that the concept of being both an artist and an architect is difficult to situate in the markets of art and architecture – which depend on singular messaging for easy consumption.

And I am suspicious of concepts or metaphors that link art and architecture through the idea of creativity, as the two practices are very different in method, outcome, dialogue and culture. That said, my architectural practice informs my art practice – and vice versa. It is clear to me, both emotionally and intellectually, that art is a fundamental component of what it means to be human, and I would struggle to understand why anybody would not be interested and invested in it.

Image: Jan van Schaik by Albert Comper

WAMA project credits: WAMA, Australia's National Centre for Environmental Art, a state-of-the-art art gallery and botanical precinct on a 16-hectare site near the Grampians (Gariwerd). Architecture by MvS Architects + TAUT. Landscape Architecture by TRACT. Project Management by Case Meallin. Construction by Nicholson Construction.

Clémence Carayol

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