#anyone remember vivian's sister laura?

[mercurygray]

No one:

Literally no one:

me: ...say, I think I'm going to write something nice for Crank.

[amilliontinywraiths]

blog

Dear xx,

I began thinking of writing this in my head as an email — does anyone do that? Begin writing something in their head and then either let it come to completion and float away or frantically write it down? Of course people do that, that’s writing. Anyways, I was thinking of writing an email reflecting on my time at home the last six days but I did not have anyone in particular I wanted to send it to, and as it went on it seemed it was destined to be a blog post or a very long group message. Its intention is to go out to whoever gives a shit.

I’ve been at my parents house since the 22nd when I arrived so exhausted and was immediately picked up by three extremely energetic people (my father and two sisters). I was truly half awake and they took me to ramen and then to surprise my mom at her job (retail, so pre-christmas was shitty). Since then i’ve been a zombie; I wake up around 9am and drink two cups of coffee, read, eat some eggs and toast, and continue on doing nearly nothing until 5pm. I feel like a retiree.

My birthday and the holidays went by quickly, but I am v grateful to my family and small group of friends here that I celebrated with. On my birthday my family + Noah went to this very hip downtown hotel/bar and we played pool for two hours while I snuck my little sister whiskey neats. We saw some people from high school we very much so enjoy and some we very much so do not. I haven’t hung out with my sister alone in a long time so its been good to see her and relish in the fact that we are both adults now, and bond of the mutual exhaustion of our parents. Afterwards we went to a party at gloria’s house where Vivian was crowned the ‘Christmas queen.’ A very nice mom at the party showed me William steig’s children’s book Amos and Boris; I read it alone on the couch while Noah and my sister did strange Christmas-themed karaoke and shed tiny little tears.

Christmas was dramatic and tense, an annual and painful occurrence.

Yesterday I had the entire home to myself; my dad was working until 5 and my sister until 10 and my mother until 8. It was freeing! I’ve been more or less sitting alone these last few days but someone was always in proximity. My father has a tendency to but in at moments when I am really enjoying my book, and tell a story I’ve head ten times already. If I lived here perhaps it would be annoying but since I only see my dad every so often I willingly listen to stories of when he was a young man living in LA and things were not better, but warmer and different.

On the topic of books! I’ve read so much since I have been home. I brought with me the new narrative anthology, Writers Who Love Too Much and this condensed history of Ireland. I was ’rehabbing’ the Irish and British History section at work, and about an hour into alphabetizing I realized I do not know anything about the so-called homeland’s history. So I bought this little thing and told myself I’d read it (I haven’t started). For christmas, my mom gifted me Nothing to see here by Kevin Wilson, Jia tolentino’s essay collection, and also Lydia Davis’ essay collection. I finished nothing to see here on Christmas Day, and cannot praise it enough!!! I’ve been slowly reading the Davis and tolentino essays on and off. Lydia’s is much more formal and, so far, diving into the structure of writing (poetry, nonfiction, fiction) and influences she began with as a young writer. Jia’s is much more like, the internet is bad!!!!!!!!!!!

I went to the public library the day after Christmas—right after the DMV—and was amazed at how GREAT it was. This was the library I frequented as a kid, and of course I was looking in the children and young adult sections at that point, but I was never blown away by the selection (as much as one can be blown away by a book selection at eight years old). I remember having to put things on hold and waiting forever. My dad told me a couple years back they put a tax on the platte county ballot just for the library, and it passed!! So I went in there and got three brand new books that I’ve been eyeing at work: convienence store woman, human relations & other difficulties, and make it scream make it burn. I’m hurrying to finish human relations before I leave tomorrow. Its very very British.

Last night I saw Little women, which of course, was devastating. Its the first period piece—reconstruction era—I’ve seen that writes people as relatable, normal humans. The sisters wrestled and acted and their mother was KIND. not weird and strict and tense à la laura engels wildler. I, of course, felt an affinity to Jo and a disdain towards Amy. General apathy towards meg, who was played by Emma Watson, who kept forgetting she was meant to play an American and would slip into fancy English draw. I probably cried for an hour straight, those silent movie theater tears that gather at your lips and you are too resistant to wipe away as the person next to you will see you crying (weakness!). now I am slightly upset that I did not have the chance to wear such elegant shawls and ride in a carriage with timothee clementine. alas.

My fingers keep slipping on the keys, likely because I doubled down and moisturized my entire body. I shaved everything too, which I haven’t done in literal months (expo, maybe). I'm a wet seal pup.

I am getting hungry, and think I will go have that second cup of coffee and maybe some eggs and hashbrowns. Thank you for letting me ramble at you. Miss you.

From my screen to yours,

Gabi

[zarafoodrecipe]

Love, loss and architecture: The rise of Rachel Neeson

Neeson at her home in Bronte in Sydneys east, where she lives with her two children and architect partner Stephen Neille. Photo: Nic Walker Normal text sizeLarger text sizeVery large text size Rachel Neeson takes precise martinet steps as she crosses the street with a phone to her ear. Her slight frame is engulfed by a royal blue cape with a sharp mid-century cut, her russet hair drawn back from a straight fringe and clasped into a ponytail. Her features look drawn even careworn. But this image of one of the country's most exciting architects, caught through a window of her award-winning Juanita Nielsen Community Centre in inner Sydney's Woolloomooloo, is fleeting. The moment she steps inside a switch is flicked: the cares seem to melt and a smile spreads across her slightly angular face. She suggests we find a table on the mezzanine. "I doubt there'll be anyone about," she adds as we take the beach-gold stairs. "It should be quiet." Neeson, who turned 50 this month, heads a small Sydney practice with a big reputation and a dramatic backstory of love, tragedy and, finally, triumph. I'd expected a bundle of nerves, given her protestations in an email exchange about time poverty. With less than 24 hours before leaving for the Venice Biennale of Architecture with her children, Alice, 11, and Otto, 8, and partner Stephen Neille also an architect Neeson is in a crunch with books to balance, a young family to corral, and last-minute travel arrangements to make. The Juanita Nielsen Centre, winner of the profession's 2017 national awards for both heritage and public architecture, is light-filled and vibrant. The handrail is encased in leather, the kitchen is a glossy vermilion, while the tactile internal concrete walls have a gentle corrugation. "This came out of thinking about the play of light on a fluted surface we asked ourselves, 'How do you give this concrete core a sense that it's been touched by hand, and thought about?'" Neeson explains. The centre is named after Juanita Nielsen, an urban activist who disappeared in 1975, aged 38, her body never found. In Neeson's work the act of remembering Nielsen is delicately handled: more celebratory wake than funereal dirge. I ask about the jaunty black-and-white diagonally striped awnings outside. "Maybe we went overboard there," Neeson laughs. "We came to think of it as the Juanita stripe. She had a fondness for stripes. And it's there in the pattern on the ceiling." With work the subject, her gestures are so fluidly expressive to illustrate a point, both hands caress the air in a hula-like move that I remark on them. Dance, she says, was her first artistic love: "I would have been a dancer if I could have been." Advertisement There's a joyful quality to the centre that architecture critic Laura Harding sees as a defining characteristic of Neeson's work. One of her best-known houses, at Whale Beach, twists and turns over three levels on a steeply sloping hillside, each room designed to capture a new facet of the ocean and headland view. It was co-designed with her late husband Nick Murcutt, a rising star in his own right and the son of Glenn, the only Australian to win architecture's equivalent of the Nobel, the Pritzker Prize. Nick was Neeson's partner in life, love and architecture until his death seven years ago from cancer, at 46. That she emerged from grief with her delight in form, space and texture intact is a wonder and a gift. The redesigned Prince Alfred Park Pool in inner Sydney, known as Redfern Beach. Photo: Brett Boardman The same playful quality, almost a tone, is there in the Kempsey-Crescent Head Surf Life Saving Club on the NSW mid-north coast, which Neeson overhauled in 2015. Its opaline glazed brick surface was inspired by a handful of pipi shells. The building's bold heft and equally expressive wide-screen views help to place it firmly in its coastal setting. And it's there in Neeson's upgrade of the Prince Alfred Park Pool, referred to by inner-Sydneysiders as "Redfern Beach": a reimagining replete with yellow umbrellas, timber surfaces and sky-blue stripes of a fenced recreation space that had previously looked like a grim cell block. The sweet-sad memory of Nick Murcutt threads through Neeson's reflections on the Juanita Nielsen building. "You know, this was the first public tender we won" she uses "we" when referring to the practice "after Nick's death." She pauses to make a quick calculation. "It was, I think, 15 months later." Surveying an exposed-brick wall, she raises her eyes to the herringbone patterned roof beams as one looks fondly into the face of a friend. Neeson's story of love and architecture and love through architecture is a common enough tale in a profession perfectly suited, almost designed, for partners in love and work: Finns Alvar and Aino Aalto, Americans Charles and "Ray" Eames, and honorary Australians Marion Mahony and Walter Burley Griffin. A variation on the theme looms closer to home. Glenn Murcutt and his architect wife Wendy Lewin weave in and out of collaboration like partners in a waltz. They jointly designed an education centre at Bundanon in a bend of the Shoalhaven River that inspired many of Arthur Boyd's later works, and, more recently, a museum at the Australian Opal Centre in Lightning Ridge, both in NSW. The collaborative principle that is so evident in Neeson and Nick's work flows through her four-year relationship with Neille, who has joined her as co-director from his base in Perth. The practice may in reality these days be Neeson Neille, but it still bears the name Neeson Murcutt Architects, in honour of its legacy. Earlier this month, Neeson and Neille found themselves sharing the winners' podium at the annual Houses magazine awards in Sydney, when they picked up a gong for their first project together their own home, on a busy street close to Bronte beach. At the same ceremony Neeson accepted an award for the last project that she and Nick designed together, a robust concrete house set in an exotic coastal Sydney garden. "It was like seeing the arc of time distilled into a moment," says one architect at the ceremony. Advertisement The Juanita Nielsen Community Centre. Photo: Brett Boardman Neeson's childhood, much of it spent on the move in Europe, was by any measure unconventional. The daughter of an electrician father and nurse mother who decided they wanted to travel the world, she didn't live in a standard suburban home until she was a 19-year-old university student. Before that it had been a procession of transient digs. She and her younger sister and brother would find themselves in class one day, on a flight from England to Spain the next. "I learnt how to make friends in a caravan park within 20 minutes," she laughs. Did her sense of place as an architect develop from a placeless childhood? "On the contrary," she shoots back. "It was place-rich." She remembers the precise day in 1988 that she met Nick. A second-year architecture student at Sydney University, she joined a student panel to help select the new chair of architecture for a department open to student input. Nick, then a fifth-year student, was also on the panel. He was Australian architecture aristocracy the dauphin. She had no architectural pedigree at all. But what she did have was smarts Neeson would win the architecture medal with first-class honours upon graduation a dancer's poise and a girl-most-likely air. Their relationship began in 1995, after which the collaborative immersion was all-embracing. In 2004 they formalised it with the creation of Neeson Murcutt Architects, and began to reel in prestigious awards for subtle, place-sensitive homes that never seemed the product of an existing school or design dogma. Architect Camilla Block co-designed the sinuous corner building in Sydney's Potts Point, with its crackled skin and irregular splay of windows (dubbed "Barcelona" by fellow architects) that houses both her own studio, Durbach Block Jaggers, and that of Neeson Murcutt. She worked with Nick from 1994 the firm was then Durbach Block Murcutt and still remembers the spirit of collegiate play he brought to the office. "Nick was interested in everything," she says. "He was not a head-down-bum-up type. He was in essence a pleasure seeker; he'd rather be at a restaurant than at his desk." When he talked about work, his ideas and conjectures would fire from one another, like architectural improv or bebop. In partnership with such a breezy extemporising hedonist, Neeson retreated to a role that suited, but at the same time constrained her. She became the kite holder. At the end of the string, weaving and darting, was her partner. It took all her strength and guile just to tether him and bring him back to earth. Advertisement On March 17, 2011, the couple were married. They had been together 16 years and the celebration was to have been a grand international architecture shebang in a paddock at Murcutt pre's farm at Kempsey. But Nick was at the tail-end of a nine-month battle with lung cancer. With his health rapidly failing, the wedding was pared down to a spare essence, the ceremony held at his bedside. The following day, he died at home in Bondi. It was a black moment for Australia's intensely competitive yet curiously clannish architecture profession. The funeral, held at the Church of St Canice in Sydney's Elizabeth Bay, was packed to overflowing as architects from the country and the city, men and women, old and young, drew together. "It was unutterably sad," recalls a figure in the architecture world, who declines to be named. "Glenn couldn't speak. He was crushed. Nick's mother spoke, though, and brought alive the boy and young man Nick had been." Neeson, never less than lithe, was almost skeletal. Some were concerned for her and her young family. Others were struck by the fortitude that shone through her physical frailty. For Philip Vivian, director of storied architecture firm Bates Smart, it was the first time he had registered her "incredible inner strength". None were aware of the full extent of the catastrophe, though they would soon enough. Neeson was reeling not only from the death of her lover, business partner and the father of her two children; she was also facing the imminent crash of their flourishing architectural practice. "I had significant personal debt, a one-year-old, a four-year-old, and nine staff," she recalls. In a stoical tone, one hand kneading the other, she says she and her children moved from the small Bondi place she'd shared with Nick to a rambling home with her parents in Sydney's inner west. It was here that she began to repair. Rachel Neeson and Nick Murcutt in 2009 at the Whale Beach property they designed. Photo: Steven Siewert The first year was the worst. Nick was not so much a memory as a spectral presence, and Neeson would often find herself conjuring his large and sunny spirit. "I would have these discussions with Nick in my head," she says. "Or I would try to." The couple had been so deeply immersed in collaboration that not even death, it seemed, could silence their duet. She retains a memento of the architectural conversation that anchored their love in a concept drawing of a house in Castlecrag for which the couple won the 2011 Robin Boyd Award for Residential Architecture. Perched above Sydney Harbour, tucked in behind a sandstone outcrop and nestled in an angophora forest, it features bold gestures of brick, stone, concrete and wood. "One of us had blue pen, one of us had black pen, and you can see the lines weaving together as we designed with that special site in mind," she says. By the time the house was completed, Nick's health was deteriorating. The couple spent a few summer nights there by the water, with the clients' permission, before the clients moved in. "Friends would drop around. It was beautiful." Advertisement Collaboration had given their young practice an undergirding, and creative dynamism. But it also left it vulnerable. Nick had been the business manager, even though business was not his strength. They'd not thought to take out life insurance, and the debt from medical bills by the time of his death was frightening. Neeson's first step was to hire a new accountant, one who didn't make her feel "stupid" when she asked financial questions. The second required deeper reserves of character. If the practice was to survive the death of its most visible partner she would need to grow, to reclaim dimensions of herself she'd ceded to her freewheeling, charismatic soulmate. "For Nick, architecture was a much more intuitive thing," she says. "We were complementary in that sense. I think he enjoyed that the addition of what the other can bring. We both enjoyed it." A tentative smile spreads across her face and her hands unclasp. "Some time after he died, I started to draw on my own intuition more deeply. It takes confidence to trust one's intuition, and perhaps my confidence has grown in the years since Nick's death, because it has had to." If she had failed, after his death, to deepen her own intuitive capacity she would not be the architect she is now: celebrated by her profession's highest honours, widely respected for both her courage and talent. Recalls Bates Smart's Philip Vivian: "Rachel set about completing buildings begun with Nick such as the Prince Alfred Park Pool upgrade, which is a stunning piece of work, as well as her own projects such as the Kempsey surf club at Crescent Head. It must have taken immense fortitude to continue on with the practice." Vivian would later put Neeson's name forward for a large project at Newmarket Green in eastern Sydney's Randwick, a puzzle of low- and high-density housing, parks, new streets and remodelled heritage buildings. Neeson's team chipped in with a three-storey apartment building characterised by crisp lines, spacious lobbies and varicoloured brickwork. A story Vivian tells of the pitch for that project highlights Neeson's realisation of the need to project in person the vibrancy that is so much part of her work. "The developer was worried about Neeson Murcutt, as they were a small practice," he recalls. "We set up a meeting for their head of residential development to meet Rachel at a coffee shop. It was meant to be an informal chat, but somehow, when it came to selling the work of Neeson Murcutt, Rachel had an odd moment, and couldn't promote herself." Another architect, who was at that meeting, confirms the story. "She totally fluffed it," he recalls. The story offers an insight into the difficulties faced by a reserved, cerebral woman heading a small practice in the masculine world of building development, where it's all about the pitch. "That was a real learning experience," Neeson tells me. After the meeting, she berated herself: "This was a meeting with a developer and he just needed to know how good I am! Instead I gave him the typical female under-sell. I really needed to put my best foot forward and to make sure everyone could see that foot that it wasn't hidden beneath a skirt." Pipi shells inspired Neeson's design for the outside of the Kempsey-Crescent Head SLSC, which she overhauled in 2015. Photo: Brett Boardman Advertisement The position of women within a profession dominated by heroic male architects is slowly changing. Neeson's success reflects that change. Men are potent figures in her story but it was Neeson who kept the practice alive in the dark days; who learnt how to work without her partner; how to pass those lessons to her staff. She has evolved her own distinctive aesthetic; rigorous yet playful, with a touch of intrigue, married to a minimalism not of form but of ego. She makes a point of drawing professional women into her working life. Her go-to landscape designer is Sue Barnsley, and Iranian-born designer and academic Maryam Gusheh has recently joined as a part-time critical adviser. "There is a strong movement right now in gender equity which I think is particularly important in larger architecture practices, which have forever been male-heavy at the top," Neeson says. After this interview, she is expecting a visit from the famed Barcelona-based architect Carme Pins: the women met while Neeson was completing a master's degree in the Spanish city. Roughly the same number of women and men graduate each year with architecture degrees in Australia, but noticeably fewer women enjoy the rewards that come with partnership in a big firm. Fewer still have steered their own firms as Iraqi-British architect and Pritzker Prize winner Zaha Hadid did. So concerned is the profession about gender equity at the moment that a group, with the somewhat cheerleaderish title Architect Male Champions of Change, has formed to advance the cause. SJB Sydney director Adam Haddow, along with fellow member Philip Vivian, is convinced that a more evenly balanced profession would make for a better built environment. "I think in Rachel's work we're able to see how delightful our cities could be," he tells me. "From my perspective, there is an understanding of 'local essence' or a hyper sense of 'knowledge of place' in the work of Neeson Murcutt but at the same time there is nothing familiar or preconceived. It is as if with every project, Rachel and the Neeson Murcutt team are able to take you somewhere you didn't even know existed the work is refreshing and delightful. I always walk away from it with a feeling of 'I wish I'd done that.'" The husband-wife pattern is so pronounced in architecture that female architects, until relatively recently, were usually known through collaboration with their famous husbands. A 2001 survey of American architects found that one-fifth had a "spouse or significant other" who was an architect. "Women as architecture leaders in their own right have been less visible," Neeson agrees, adding that her generation "is the first where this has changed". That change is evident in the names of those talked about with excitement in Australian design circles these days. Neeson and Camilla Block work a similar seam to Clare Cousins, Kerstin Thompson and Hannah Tribe, Amelia Holliday and Isabelle Toland; all head their own small firms or work in partnership with one other architect. Others, such as Abbie Galvin, principal of the Australian-based international firm BVN; Emma Williamson, director of COX; and Olivia Hyde, the NSW Government's director of design excellence, hold leadership roles in large firms. Of this group Cousins is the most prominent dual-tasker: she is head of her own Melbourne-based practice and national president of the Australian Institute of Architects. Whether they specialise in the architectural versions of solo or orchestral parts, none of these women play second fiddle to anyone. Neeson with Stephen Neille. Photo: Erieta Attali Neeson met Stephen Neille at Sydney University before she met Nick Murcutt. It was her first year, and Neille's fifth. "Stephen and I were both participating in a national student competition," she recalls (she came second). "We became friends and remained so over all those years." The couple fell in love in 2014 and he moved to Sydney a year later from Perth, where he'd been in partnership with Simon Pendal. Her move to, in a sense, corporatise the relationship with Neille, as she and Nick had done in 2004, was never desired or planned. "It was our intention that once Stephen moved to Sydney, he would keep working with Simon," she explains. "But he and Simon just found working apart on opposite sides of the country too difficult." Neeson's talent and tenacity helped to stabilise the practice, but it has not been a smooth, steadily upward trajectory. "A few years ago, when every architectural practice in Sydney was going gangbusters, I realised we had no new work," she says. Her instinctive response was to put out feelers, as she had done in the year after Nick's death. "I started to quietly let my colleagues know," she offers. "I would ask if they had any projects to spare." She may have been nettled by her former accountant's response to her financial queries, but she is fearless about quizzing colleagues on big- and small-picture architectural issues. An architect at a commercially successful Sydney firm recalls Neeson buttonholing him at a function on the subject of big project management. Her willingness to reach out to colleagues contributes to an impression of modesty, even vulnerability, which is rare in a profession with a fondness for uncompromising individualists. "A friend asked me around the time of Nick's death what my goals were," Neeson says. "I aimed to break even. I never thought we would grow." But the firm is growing. There are now 13 staff, including three students, 10 "active" projects and a number of entries in public competitions. When Neeson Murcutt began, high-end homes were Neeson's metier. But as her practice has matured, her focus has turned increasingly towards sophisticated projects of public interest that synthesise landscape, heritage and culture. The Kamay Botany Bay National Park, on the site where James Cook took his first steps on the eastern seaboard, is the latest. "It is the most important site in Australia," she says. "It has such a story. The people here were the earliest displaced people in our country." In the process of developing a plan for the park, she has learnt that the blooming of the wattle heralds the northerly migration of whales along this stretch of coast. "Doesn't everyone want to know that?" she asks with an unbridled flash of joy. "I want to know that!" Rachel Neeson at her home in Bronte, for which she and Stephen Neille won a design award. Photo: Nic Walker We catch up for a second time after Neeson's return from Italy, at a Kings Cross cafe in a laneway close to her practice. I expect her to regale me about the architectural splendours of Rome, where the family holidayed after the biennale. But she's keen to talk instead about her observations of the way children respond to architecture their "beautiful strength", sense of "wonder" and innate "spatial" intelligence. She and Neille had taken Alice and Otto into the dome of St Peter's Basilica. They laboured to the top, as Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg famously did in Fellini's La Dolce Vita, along a progressively narrowing stairway between Michelangelo's inner and outer domes. The experience brought home to her, in a direct and immediate way, the "bodily" sensation of space, which in this case bordered on claustrophobia. At the top, with Rome spread out below, contained space gave way to infinite space, and she could breathe again. Michelangelo's dome was not so much a revelation as a reminder of what she does with architecture. "I really try to imagine the human activity the building will host and understand it not just from a functional perspective, but from an active feeling perspective," she says. When Camilla Block casts her mind back to the friend she knew in the days before architecture and life got serious, she sees a woman striving to keep her partner at his desk. "He would much rather drift away for a chat," she recalls. "Or go out to lunch." Neeson didn't need to channel Nick's more expansive talents after his death, she observes, as she had them all along. "They've always been there. We just take on certain roles in a relationship. Rachel was always capable of being who she is." Hair and make-up by David Grainger. To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald or The Age. https://www.smh.com.au/national/love-loss-and-architecture-the-rise-of-rachel-neeson-20180822-p4zyyd.html?ref=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_source=rss_feed