Glenn Murcutt – Spirit of Place: a documentary as graceful as the man and the career that it describes

Catherine Hunter, “Glenn Murcutt – Spirit of Place” (2017)

A beautiful and graceful documentary as elegant as the architecture of the man whose work it documents, “Glenn Murcutt – Spirit of Place” is a good introduction not just to Murcutt’s career and the buildings he has produced but also to the way in which a particular architect goes about designing a building and collaborates with others (particularly builders) to complete a project. We see how and why Murcutt insists on overseeing every aspect and stage of a building’s design and construction, why his practice has remained a one-man practice and consequently why his body of work includes very few large-scale buildings, at least until he accepted a commission to design and build a mosque for the Newport Muslim community in Melbourne.

Through interviews with Murcutt, his past clients, other architects and members of the Newport Muslim community, film-maker Catherine Hunter demonstrates how Murcutt’s work responds to its environment and interacts with it in ways that produce a sense of serenity and being at one with that environment. The film traces Murcutt’s career from its early days and influences – including the influence of his parents’ house in Clontarf where he and his brother grew up – and showcases three houses (the Marie Short house in Kempsey, the Magney house on the NSW South Coast and the Simpson-Lee house in the Blue Mountains) that not only are the highlights of his long career but also show a distinctive style that adapts to the qualities of the building materials used and uses them to produce a feeling of lightness and quiet strength. This history is intertwined with Murcutt’s collaboration with the Newport Muslim community to design and build a mosque that embodies the community’s desire to proclaim its Australian and Muslim identity and to share its values of tolerance, compassion and grace with others, Muslim and non-Muslim.

The narrative traced by the film isn’t all punctuated by one success after another: the mosque construction is stalled by a shortage of funds and planning issues, and Murcutt suffers a personal tragedy through the untimely death of his son Nick from cancer, cutting short a promising career in following his father’s foot-steps. Some members of the Muslim community are unhappy with Murcutt’s radical design for the mosque. (Strangely, the film says nothing about local council reactions to the mosque or the reactions of other residents in Newport to the building.) These setbacks are overcome when the Newport Muslim community rally to support Murcutt in his time of grieving after his son dies.

Murcutt’s buildings are photographed in such ways as to emphasise their unassuming grace and beauty. The mosque, when completed, turns out to be something else altogether different: it’s still a marvel of design but it uses glass panes of different colours to lighten and allow light into a concrete building, and the geometrical forms of the extensions holding the glass panes in their own way follow past Islamic architectural design tradition in inviting onlookers to contemplate them and reflect on the structures of the universe and its cosmic maker.

The documentary is easy to follow and viewers quickly come to appreciate the unconventional path Murcutt has followed in his career, that enables him to maintain his style and uphold the values and beliefs about what architecture should do for people that style expresses. Not for him the major commercial commissions that might compromise his vision and values while enriching him and making him better known than he already is; his attitude is to hold fast in what he believes and desires for his clients and for Australian architecture generally.