Working with Country. Collaborating with Country. Collaborating on Country. Bi-cultural design. Each of these are threads of a conversation within architecture and design, and the wider Australian social and cultural landscape, that have been gaining momentum in recent years. At the forefront of this critical discourse and its practical, real-world application within the built environment is Jefa Greenaway.

Architect, interior designer, academic, director of Greenaway Architects and founding director of Indigenous Architecture and Design Australia (IADA), Australia’s only Indigenous design association, Greenaway is without doubt one the leading voices in bi-cultural design and its potential to enrich the lived experience of all Australians for generations to come.

Of Wailwan/Kamilaroi (northwest NSW) and German heritage, Greenaway found his path into architecture somewhat serendipitously. Originally studying political science at Latrobe University, Greenaway decided to shift focus to a double major including planning halfway through his degree. During a seemingly innocuous conversation with his politics tutor, he mentioned that his real interest lay not so much in planning the built world but in designing it, and he really wanted to become an architect.

As is the want of university tutors, introductions to the right people and letters of introduction were made. Armed with this letter of introduction to Evan Walker, who, as it would be revealed later, was the dean of the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Architecture Building & Planning, and his portfolio, “I just sort of knocked on his door and had a chat with him,” recalls Greenaway. “I didn’t realise he was an architect. I knew him [Walker] as a politician because he was the former Minister for Planning and former Minister for Aboriginal Affairs. We spoke about everything except architecture.”

There is a widely held belief in the art world that all art is political. Renowned multi-disciplinary Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, for example believes that all objects have political significance.

When asked if he believes this is true of architecture too, Greenaway doesn’t stop to think. “Oh, 100 percent. I certainly contend that when we speak about an Indigenous conception of architecture, it is political to the core because invariably we are often disenfranchised,” he says.

“We often don’t have the capital to realise formal outcomes. We’re often holding the hand out to be supported and applying for grants to enable us to actually create the spaces and places that we require to support the needs of our communities.”

While there are many ways to shift the status quo and address the pressing issues of disenfranchisement, inequitable distributions and access to capital which Greenaway mentions, one of the most important and impactful is, without doubt, education. “Knowledge and education is emancipation,” Greenaway says.

For this reason, among many obvious others, Greenaway’s recent winning scheme to design UTS’s First Nations College, a project which sees him take on the role of Architect and cultural design lead, is particularly significant. “It’s a game-changing proposition and design, as well as a challenge. The reason I say that is because it synthesises everything that I’ve been interested in over the last 25-plus years of my career,” he says.

The project, designed in collaboration with Oculus and Warren and Mahoney (WAM), and Oculus a practice originally from Aotearoa New Zealand with offices in both Melbourne and Sydney, is bi-cultural, even tri-cultural, design made manifest. The first of its kind in Australia, the college is a globally significant exemplar how outstanding architectural design can be fused with First Nations design principles to create an exceptional outcome for people and place, becoming much more than just a building.

“This purpose-built residential college is a catalyst to support First Nations people from across Australia and the world to flourish within the culturally safe envelope of the building itself,” Greenaway says. “It is created from a blank canvas in terms of the structure of the facility which houses the college, as well as governance and the organisation of the college itself.

The cultural anchor to the project is knowledge sharing. There will be a library, there will be a gallery space, there will be opportunities to curate the possibilities around an Indigenous incubator or supporting Indigenous enterprise. It coalesces all these different stands of creating a place for dwelling, a place for cultural safety, a place for learning.”

As with all large-scale architectural and development projects, the challenges for Greenaway and his collaborators were multifaceted. One particular challenge was how to meaningfully embed Country into the design. How do you give expression to intangible layers of history, bring them to the surface and express them coherently and empathetically through steel, concrete, walls, floors and ceilings?

The answer for Greenaway was simple. “Country-centred design requires one to look at the provenance of material choices. To create forms which very much respond to and speak to the ideas that have shaped this specific landscape. Water has eroded and changed this landscape. Air has changed it. We used these earthly realities together with contemporary concepts of biophilic design and cross ventilation to serve as a cultural connector within the concept and the design scheme of the campus as a whole.”

The First Nations College at UTS is not the first time Greenaway has collaborated with WAM. “The team at WAM understand intuitively, by virtue of the New Zealand experience, the importance of foregrounding First Nations perspectives into projects,” Greenaway says. There is a willingness and an openness to have a dialogue and to support the process to enable that to happen meaningfully.”

One of the recent collaborative projects which set the tone for a strong working relationship was the design of WAM’s Melbourne office. “They were wanting to have a presence within the Australian condition, so we engaged in a synergistic exploration of their design intent, discovering how to align and represent their practice, at the same time as forging a deep understanding of the specificity of Country as a starting premise,” Greenaway explains.

The resulting design, which exists in what was originally a Victorian-era banking precinct, is “an amalgam of competing forces that exist, revealing layers of history and memory, which sets up an interesting tension within the design narrative.”

At every turn, from the tectonics and form all the way through to materiality, colour, and texture, the WAM office is a beautifully articulated reflection of those who occupy the space now, those who came centuries before, and the potential that exists when collaborators work together from a place of mutual respect and understanding.

This cohesion is achieved in two ways. First, through the concept that in any organisational structure, and particularly in creative practices, “the centre is where we come together and sit down, we gather, and we talk and tease out and explore ideas”.

This concept is given physical shape by siting the creative hub of the studio in the physical centre of the space. Second, in a fortuitous “accident” the heritage restrictions, which dictated the floorplate of the building, meant that the office would have two entry points, one at the front and one at the rear. “The way we conceptualised it was that the Indigenous and the Māori come in at different points, but meet at the centre,” Greenaway says.

Whether he is leading, collaborating or teaching Greenaway is always searching for the threads that bind at the centre. As an architect and respected First Nations leader, his work and approach to working with Country goes far beyond formal gestures or materiality alone.

It sets the standard of architectural form, function and poetic beauty, all the while leaning into the inherently political nature of architectural practice itself. Taken together, each of his buildings and designs for public spaces are far greater than the sum of their parts. Imbued with the culture, history and stories that lie just beneath the surface of the land upon which his buildings stand, each is a lesson on cultural quilting that true collaboration, informed by mutual respect, can bring.

Lead image: Warren and Mahoney’s studio in the Melbourne CBD. Photography by Shannon McGrath.

This article originally appeared in inside 119. Click here to subscribe and receive future issues.