2018 - Jury comment

The jury unanimously agreed that Space and Time is deserving of the Premier Award for Australian Interior Design, selected from a field of outstanding contenders. While the project challenges the idea of how we use space, it also shakes up the status quo by asking important questions that need to be asked. What is interior design today? Is temporality key in contemporary interior design? How can designers and architects approach interior design in new and exciting ways?

This project is as unexpected as it is rigorous and its design sets a new precedent for encouraging innovation and not merely copying what’s been done before. The jury was impressed that Space and Time feels like a genuine laboratory and as one jury member commented, “There’s a sense that stuff can be truly invented here.” It tries to push the envelope and succeeds and for this reason the project could hold its own at an international level. The jury also commended its experimental nature and the way light is used to great effect in transforming the space and transporting visitors to another place.

2021 - Jury comment

Russell & George has used the design of its workspace to liberate its own business, with opportunities to reinvent the process of design across our profession. The impact of this project cannot be appreciated from the photographs alone; it resides in understanding that Space & Time is a spatial and organisational representation of a first-principles rethink of how a practice can be imagined. As design entrepreneurs, the team has taken risks to progress their own process of design, with potentially far-reaching impacts for the broader profession and how we work. 

The highly adaptable workspace equally supports the team, enables prototyping and small-scale manufacture in the workshop and, importantly, provides space to host events. Two to three events per month provide sufficient income to cover business costs. This gives the team the freedom to be selective in the work they take on, and allows them greater time to research new materials and processes. In turn, this approach has led to significant innovations in how Russell & George designs and delivers projects and products. In the modernist tradition, Russell and George’s work encompasses design and prototyping across architecture, interior design and industrial design. Through its workspace and the subsequent outcomes that evolved from its design and construction, Russell & George is reacting to the aspects of our profession that no longer reflect the modernist tradition: fees and program. A desire for more time to actually design and provide high-quality, well-detailed spaces and products that are not eroded by so-called “value management” has lead Russell & George to re-evaluate the traditional methods of design and project delivery.

Using the design and construction of its workspace as a prototype, the team used coding to develop a protocol for procurement and documentation. The resulting program automates processes and documentation to preserve important briefing and design time. Initially an in-house process, the program is currently being developed into commercial design software for use by the architecture and design industry. Space & Time has exceeded its own ambitions. It is strongly evident that the organisational model that the design supports has not only transformed Russell & George, but offers some valuable and potentially cathartic innovations to the rest of our profession. Watch this Space (and Time)!