Sydney Beaches, Future Towers, and How to Park Cars on the Moon

Linda Bennett of Archi-Ninja has posted an interview with Sydneysider architect and fellow blogger Marcus Trimble.

[Image: Proposal for a new UTS Tower by Super Colossal].

By way of some historical context, Marcus was writing one of the few architecture blogs out there, during an earlier phase in the field (say, 2004-2005), when Archinect, City of Sound, Archidose, Strange Harvest, we make money not art, Life Without Buildings, things magazine, and not a lot of others (though some deserving sites have been left out of that truncated and subjective list) were the only blogs offering consistent architectural coverage. Inhabitat didn’t exist till mid-2005; same with Pruned; Subtopia had yet to be launched; and the bigger sites today, like Dezeen, which sidestep architectural journalism altogether to focus simply on image reproduction and/or social networking, were still years away.

But there was Marcus, writing his first blog gravestmor—which lasted from May 18th, 2004, to July 12, 2007—a site that morphed into a blog for his own architectural practice, Super Colossal. That firm has since gone on to win first place in the Gold Coast Performing Arts Centre design competition (proposing a sort of inhabitable bridge -slash- artificial harbor island), as well as the high-profile Australian Peacekeeping Memorial (and their overlooked design for a new UTS Tower, which can be seen in the image above). Of course, those are in addition to several finished projects, including a private house, apartment, bathroom renovation, and the internet-famous cardboard cubby house.

[Image: Super Colossal’s competition-winning design for Gold Coast Performing Arts Centre].

But it’s Marcus’s roving and very widespread field of interests that made gravestmor so appealing, and that Super Colossal extends today—whether it’s his ongoing explorations of comic book architecture, steampunk spaces, the racial politics of Sydney beaches, how to park cars on the moon, urban space as depicted in the work of J.G. Ballard, his suggestion that China might really be a USB external harddrive for the French, and much more. This was actually the first post I ever remember seeing over there—and I was pretty much hooked from then on.

[Image: “Lost and Found” by Marcus Trimble].

In any case, the interview over at Archi-Ninja is a bit on the short side, and I would love to hear more from Marcus about his active organizational role down there in Sydney, promoting that city’s architects and their work both to one another and to the rest of the world. But it’s still worth a read, covering space elevators, the films of Stanley Kubrick and Michael Mann, the future of the architect, running in the city, and more.