The Gold Medal is the Australian Institute of Architects’ highest honour. It recognises distinguished service by architects who have designed or executed buildings of high merit, produced work of great distinction resulting in the advancement of architecture, or endowed the profession in a distinguished manner. The 2022 recipient of the Gold Medal is Sean Godsell. 

Godsell’s body of work, publications, exhibitions and speaking and teaching engagements have been accoladed in Australia. But, for a small-practice architect who has completed a relatively modest number of dedicated projects, his level of international recognition is unparalleled. Godsell’s work has contributed significantly by expressing, on a global stage, an architectural response to Australia’s unique landscape. 

Godsell was born in Melbourne in 1960 and graduated with first-class honours from the University of Melbourne in 1984. He spent much of 1985 travelling in Japan and Europe, and worked in London for Denys Lasdun from 1986 to 1988. In 1989, he returned to Melbourne and, in 1994, formed Godsell Associates Architects. 

He obtained a master of architecture degree from RMIT University in 1999, with a thesis titled “The appropriateness of the contemporary Australian dwelling.” His work has been published in many of the world’s leading architectural journals, including The Architectural Review (UK), Architectural Record (US), Domus and Casabella (Italy), A+U and GA Houses (Japan), Detail (Germany), Le Moniteur (France) and Arquitectura Viva (Spain). 

In 2003, Godsell received a citation from the president of the American Institute of Architects for his work for the homeless. His Future Shack prototype was exhibited from May to October 2004 at the Smithsonian Institute’s Cooper Hewitt design museum in New York. He has lectured in the US, UK, China, Japan, India, France, Italy and New Zealand as well as across Australia, and was a keynote speaker at the Alvar Aalto Symposium in Finland in July 2006.

In 2008, Kenneth Frampton nominated Godsell for the inaugural BSI Swiss Architectural Award for architects under the age of 50 and his work was exhibited in both the Milan Triennale and the Venice Biennale in the same year. 

In 2013, the influential Spanish publication El Croquis published the monograph ‘Sean Godsell – Tough Subtlety’. In 2013 and 2014, he was visiting professor at the IUAV WAVE workshop in Venice, and he delivered the UNESCO Chair Open Lecture in Mantova, Italy. Godsell received the 2016 Detail Prize in Germany for the 2014 MPavilion. In 2018, he received a Papal Silver Medal for his Vatican Chapel on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice. The same year, by invitation, Godsell spoke in the US at the New Canaan Historical Society, the New York Architectural League and Yale University School of Art and Architecture.

Godsell’s architecture reflects an Australian architect responding to a deeply moral and territorial ethos. It is as unwavering as it is singular. His projects constitute an assembly of intricate detail, free of expectation. His work is at once personal, rigorous and relevant, and each project is envisioned from its specific context.

The essence of this citation is best summed up in the words of Philip Goad and his reference to Godsell’s residential work in the monograph Sean Godsell: Houses: “The nine houses featured in this book become almost totemic – symbolic or representative of a spatialising of how one might want or hope to live in one of the oldest countries but newest nations in the world. That is a bold statement, but then equally bold is the relentless, headstrong search for perfectible form and space that Godsell continues to undertake with near eremitic persistence… It is not an easy path when following such a singular goal.”1

Godsell’s work defines an extraordinary commitment to excellence in design, detail and resolution, allowing us to experience the expression of an intense master craftsman. To achieve all of this in his practice timeframe is an extraordinary achievement that should be recognised, lauded and celebrated. 

Register for the 2022 BuildNZ event here. Attendees of the presentation can earn 15 NZRAB CPD points.

1. Philip Goad in Sean Godsell: Houses (London: Thames and Hudson, 2019)

The main body of this article first appeared on architectureau.com.