T r o p p o a r c h i t e c t s. Troppo Architects. Natural disasters, perversely, have their silver linings. Like Hurricane Katrina in our times, Cyclone Tracy’s razing of Darwin on Christmas Eve 1974 combined catastrophe with unexpected opportunity. Tracy destroyed more than 70 percent of Darwin’s buildings, left most of its population homeless, and continues to haunt the inhabitants of Australia’s Top End. Architects and builders who flocked to the devastated city in the years after the cyclone were required to build a new cyclone-proof city from scratch. It required the kind of resourcefulness – speed, flexibility, ingenuity and technological innovation – that the building industry is rarely called upon to exercise.
When Phil Harris and Adrian Welke migrated north from Adelaide at the end of the 1970s, the building frenzy was still going strong, but the buildings that were being produced were disappointing. Concrete and conservative, they took a literal-minded approach to the strict new anti-cyclone building regulations. WD Architects - Environmentally Sustainable Design - Sunshine Co. Balemaker Tropical Houses. Tropical house plans builder and hous. Tropical House Design - by Vincent Fischer-Zernin. Piper Designs - Tropical Hawaiian Home Plans. Studio Mango, Cairns Architects. Sustainable Housing Design, Tro. Glenn Murcutt. Glenn Murcutt (b. London, England 1936) Glenn Murcutt was born in London in 1936. He grew up in the Morobe district of New Guinea, where he developed a preference for simple, primitive architecture. His father introduced him to the architecture of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and the philosophies of Henry David Thoreau, both of which influenced his architectural style.
Murcutt studied architecture at the University of New South Wales from 1956 to 1961. During this same period, he worked with a series of architects. In an initial exploratory phase Murcutt established a mastery of the Miesian style. References Dennis Sharp. Details Pritzker Prize Laureate, 2002.