Architecture’s context – social, physical and historical – is revealed most vitally not through correct stylistic exemplars or earlier ideas enacted as gospel, but through many different connections. In Kerstin Thompson’s architecture and that of her firm Kerstin Thompson Architects (KTA), established in 1994, these connections have life and vigour as they work through and shape each project. Thompson’s response to and endlessly inventive use of context is surely a major reason for her Gold Medal. The context varies constantly, but KTA’s way of engaging it follows common themes. The work, eloquent in architectural expression, forms a major episode in Australian architecture. At the same time, Thompson and her office have stepped right away from the habitual public heroism of modern architecture’s Australian experience. KTA’s work is marked throughout by its gentleness in countenance. This comes most markedly in the modulation of transparency – “literal and phenomenal,” as Colin Rowe and Robert Slutsky once explained it.1 Inside the boundary wall, Thompson’s architecture embraces form in themes: they include the great circle, the thread and the most detailed response to circumstance.
How does this varied transparency work? In Melbourne’s north-eastern suburbs, Warrandyte Police Station (2007) changes its personality like lightning: domestic to the street front, around the corner it becomes a castle with scanning eyes and a small oriel window. In Marysville Police Station (2012) in regional Victoria, in a strange landscape partly regrown after bushfire destruction, the street-wall transparency changes over a long elevation, with sticks of timber recalling life
