Glenn Murcutt’s dictum to “touch the earth lightly”1 is arguably the most memorable idea to emerge from Australian architecture so far. The image of a delicate pavilion, raised up on stilts, hovering over the landscape, has come to represent our nation’s architectural culture, and earned its author a Pritzker Prize, the profession’s highest accolade. It suggests an architecture that respects its site – one of minimal disturbance, that allows nature to flow easily around and underneath, at once of the landscape and apart from it.
But what does it really mean to touch the earth lightly? Can a building made out of steel – a material violently extracted, smelted and forged, at great environmental cost – ever be said to be light on the earth? (Not to mention the fact that it echoes the form of the homesteads of European colonizers, who forcibly displaced those First Australians who had really been touching the earth lightly for tens of thousands of
