New Zealand architect Brendan MacFarlane on urban renewal, heritage re-use, ecological remediation, social housing

Brendan MacFarlane and Dominique Jakob. Photo / Alexandre Tabaste

NZ architect Brendan MacFarlane is a Paris-based architect who has worked on some of the most progressive and original private and public buildings in Europe. John Walsh talks to him about the Living Landscape in Reykjavik , which follows all current climate change standards, the Herold Social Housing in Paris and the Connected House in Boulogne-Billancort.

New Zealand architects have designed many striking buildings since the turn of the century and not all of them are in our cities or suburbs. Some are half a world away — in the heart of Paris, by the riverside in Lyon, on the site of a former army depot in Orleans. These are the adventurous buildings designed by the Parisian practice led by Brendan MacFarlane and his French partner (in work and life), Dominique Jakob.

The architects founded Jakob+MacFarlane in the late 1990s and since then the firm has brought its innovative flair to the key areas of contemporary architecture: urban renewal, heritage re-use, ecological remediation, and social housing. A new book presented the firm with an opportunity to take stock as MacFarlane and his partner contemplate their latest challenge — setting up an office in Wellington.

This initiative will be something of a homecoming for 59-year-old MacFarlane. Born in Christchurch, he grew up in Wellington, first in a state house in Porirua and then in a Wadestown house designed, in California modern style, by his mother, who had an interest in design but no formal architectural training. The next move was to an old house in Kelburn. From there, he'd walk to Wellington High School, "a long slog in wintertime", he recalls, "and from a French point of view, kind of crazy."

MacFarlane went to Otago University for the intermediate year preceding his enrolment at Auckland University's School of Architecture. He loved his time at the school which, he says, "was like a family" in the late-1970s. At Auckland University he encountered teachers such as architect David Mitchell and artist Pat Hanly — "big figures with lots of opinions and a great humanity".

After a couple of years in Auckland, MacFarlane went to Sydney, where he took evening classes while working for an architecture firm with an office near Luna Park. When the work ran out, one of his bosses took some of his drawings upstairs to the office of another architect, Harry Seidler. "He came back down and said I had a new job with Harry."

Viennese-born Seidler [1923–2006] was one of the great Australian post-war architects, a hard-core Modernist, in old-school bow tie and white shirt. "Harry had his rules," MacFarlane says. "There was Modernist architecture, and anything else wasn't really serious." After the superstar American architect Frank Gehry gave a lecture in Sydney, Seidler handed down his verdict: "Great guy, but it's not architecture, it's art."

"Initially, I was scared as hell of Harry," MacFarlane says, "but as a student, he didn't have to take me too seriously." His year with Seidler was "an education in 20th-century architecture," MacFarlane says. "In tea-time sessions in the afternoon, we'd all sit around and go through the latest architecture magazines, critiquing the projects. Harry's office was another architecture school for me — a stepping-stone to the rest of the world."

MacFarlane's next leap was longer. "My sister came back from a round-the-world trip and told me I absolutely had to go to America and try to go to university there," MacFarlane says. "You mostly don't listen to older sisters but in this case I did and never regretted it."

In Los Angeles, MacFarlane went to visit the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), an alternative architecture school occupying derelict industrial sheds in Santa Monica. SCI-Arc is now a world-leading architecture school but in the early-1980s it was still in its post-hippie infancy. Tuition fees for its few dozen students were relatively low and many students lived where they studied, in a building shored-up with scaffolding, with no insulation and one unreliable shower.

"SCI-Arc was Shangri-La," MacFarlane says. "I knew I wanted to go there as soon as I walked in the door." MacFarlane moved in, and stayed for two years, sleeping in a cubicle behind a curtain and, like the school's other students, hiding the evidence of habitation when the Fire Department staged its not-so-secret raids.

MacFarlane lived in Los Angeles through the 1980s. After graduating from SCI-Arc, he taught there and also worked for Morphosis, an architecture practice co-founded by SCI-Arc instigator Thom Mayne which is famous for its metal-skinned, sharp-edged buildings— architecture, one critic wrote, that "looks as if it might hurt you". After nearly a decade in Los Angeles, it was time "to go and learn more" and MacFarlane studied for a post-graduate degree at Harvard, before moving to London.

"I thought I'd easily get a job in London, but nothing gave," he says. "So, I got on a ferry to France. I had no idea what I was going to do but the French were incredibly welcoming to a poor lost Kiwi. I met a few architects and got work quite quickly.

"What I liked in Paris was that there was a lot going on in urban design, landscape design and social housing — a lot to do with society and how people live together," MacFarlane says. "The more you work in architecture the more you become interested in the inter-relationship of things. Architecture in England seemed inward-looking. In France, the thinking is bigger. Architects are expected to look at how a city works and how you can improve things." (New Zealand's architectural focus, MacFarlane thinks, is set somewhere between the wide-angle French and narrow-band British settings, with an openness to new ideas offsetting our traditional Anglocentrism.)

In Paris, MacFarlane met Dominique Jakob, who had also worked at Morphosis but after he had left the practice. The architects' first job together was a house alteration in a Paris suburb.

"This was the start of the line," MacFarlane says. Jakob and MacFarlane later returned to the house to add rooftop bedrooms — "igloos, made of zinc". When that project was published in an architecture magazine, the new practice of Jakob+MacFarlane was invited to enter the competition to design a restaurant on top of the Pompidou Centre, the landmark Parisian cultural building that has had more than 150 million visitors since its opening in 1977.

"When the people from the Pompidou said they wanted to come and see us, we had 24 hours to transform our living room into something that resembled an architecture office," MacFarlane says. Jakob+MacFarlane was a wild card in the competition — the favourite was the celebrity designer Philippe Starck — but, says MacFarlane, "We won the bloody thing."

Restaurant Georges, Pompidou Centre, Paris. Photo / Nicolas Borel

Restaurant Georges, with its amoeba-like aluminium pods that subvert the Pompidou Centre's rectilinear grid, got a lot of attention when it opened in 2000. It was Jakob+MacFarlane's breakthrough project and introduced characteristics that would define the firm's work over the next two decades: fluid, computer-generated forms; material and technological inventiveness; and dramatic "interventions" in existing buildings.

"You don't get rid of what's in front of you," MacFarlane says. "You find a way to work with it. A city's architects are part of a lineage, a tag team working over the generations."

Frederic Malle Perfume Boutique, Paris. Photo / Roland Halbe

Above all, what distinguishes the work of Jakob+MacFarlane is a general willingness to just go for it. The practice's determination to test limits is evident across the scale of its work. This ranges from small insertions, like the Frederic Malle perfume shop (2017) in Paris' Marais district, to urban "interventions", like an addition to the FRAC Centre-Val de Loire (2013) in the historic centre of Orleans and The Docks (2012), an extension, in green-painted steel and glass, of an old concrete warehouse on the banks of the Seine. (MacFarlane was delighted when he heard that children called the building "the lizard".)

In its projects, the practice answers its own question: "How can we create an architecture of tomorrow?" There's a strong sense in Jakob+MacFarlane's work of the tension in architecture between what can be imagined and drawn — and, with computers, the possibilities are endless —and what can be built. The architects played with the problem of architecture's inescapable time lag in a concept for an "air house" — a living space defined by 40mm of air particles. "We're not there yet," MacFarlane says. "But, why not?"

Euronews HQ, Lyon. Photo / Nicolas Borel

In the real world, Jakob+MacFarlane have found ways to push architecture's boundaries, their boldness abetted by their clients' ambition and the French appetite for architectural competitions. (New Zealand has a weaker stomach for design contests.) These factors were the necessary conditions for two of Jakob+MacFarlane's most prominent projects, sibling buildings in Lyon — the Orange Cube (2010) and the fluorescent green Euronews HQ (2014) — commissioned by a mayor using iconic architecture as a means of reviving a rundown district and promoting his city.

Jakob+MacFarlane have consistently sought to engage with the big-issue architecture that attracted MacFarlane to Paris in the first place. With the 100-apartment Herold complex (2008) the firm entered the field of social housing, which, MacFarlane says, "is at the core of what it is to be an architect in Europe".

Herold social housing, Paris. Photo / Nicolas Borel

In 2019, Jakob+MacFarlane was selected as a winner in the C40 Reinventing Cities competition. Its proposal, Living Landscape, is a 26,000sq m circular timber building designed around a landscaped "eco-system". The intended site is in Reykjavik, Iceland, but the building would work, MacFarlane says, in other countries — "New Zealand, for example".

Another recent project prompted by Jakob+MacFarlane's interest in landscape design is the firm's proposed transformation of part of the Parc de la Villette, a large public park on the outskirts of Paris, into a "pedagogical farm".

These recent exercises in constructed landscapes show that, after a quarter of a century, Jakob+MacFarlane is as willing as ever to experiment and retains its optimistic spirit. "Architecture can have an amazing role in invigorating a city," MacFarlane says. "Even in a tough time, like the present, the purpose of an architect is not just to meet the absolute necessities of a city or a client. It is to design projects that on an urban level, bring a sense of hope, and at an individual level, a smile to someone's face."

Jakob+MacFarlane, by Dominique Jakob, Brendan MacFarlane and Philip Jodidio (Flammarion, 2020)