Hannah Tribe
Architect
Portrait: Toby Burrows
Interview by Janne Ryan | photography by Katherine Lu, Toby Burrows
Australian architect Hannah Tribe is transforming her world… and ours. With humour, love and creativity as her core values, and trust as her guide, she’s generating a new way of understanding buildings. Not just in service of clients, but the city at large. Nearly two decades after founding her practice, Hannah talks about goals, the reset of COVID and using humour as a buoyancy device.
what do you do and why?
I’m an architect. I make ‘pieces’ of the city and ‘pieces’ of the countryside. The city’s an amazing organism and sometimes it’s got a bit of a gap that needs a piece made or a piece changed. We also we do urban design, thinking about a whole city block or a whole suburb as an integrated unit and how it ties into all the systems. And we also do the door knobs – that’s also a piece. It’s a radical elasticity in our scale imagination.
HOW DEPENDENT ARE YOU ON A BRIEF?
We depend on the brief as a framework and a place to start. We look at the multiple scales, for example, how can we deliver to the public domain, then moving inwards and all the way down to where’s the nicest place to sit in the sun with reflected light. It’s a service role in more ways than just serving a client, it’s serving the city.
At House Au Yeung, artful new brickwork crowns a heritage bungalow. Photo: Katherine Lu
WHAT DRIVES YOU?
I did one of those ‘corporate values’ exercises. We had to get down to our three core values, but to get there we went through everything like money, success, ambition, religion, spirituality, love, all single word options. Surprisingly, I wound up with love, creativity and humour as my three core values. The love is, in a sense, loving kindness. The creativity is just wanting to make things. The humour is a buoyancy device, because following a path of love and creativity can sometimes be pretty demoralising.
AMBITION USING LOVE, CREATIVITY, HUMOUR?
I align ambition with intention, not ego. The thing that sets apart a good project and a-not-so-good project is the level of ambition. If you’re setting a really high ambition for something you’ve got to work like crazy to reach it and that can be hard. Humour is the thing that can elevate projects to the next level. If you look at a very ambitious project, like the Sydney Opera House, the bigger ambition for the building is to radically change the image of Sydney (and Australia), and its impact is global. Obviously that level of ambition, or intention, is not appropriate to every site. A house or a doctor’s surgery, for example, can give back to the street, to the suburb, offer possum pathways in trees and places for butterflies. Poetic things which are of value.
Inside House Au Yeung, old and new coalesce with wit. Photo: Katherine Lu.
YOUR STRENGTHS & weaknesses?
I’m a reasonably good communicator. Architects often speak in jargon, which means that sometimes important messages about city making, and about quality, are lost because the communication is obtuse. What else am I good at? I’m good at drawing and solving complex problems. And I’m good at the fast generation of ideas. Weaknesses: I’m not good at grunt work.
“It takes three people to make one architect.”
Learning commons at Kambala. Photo: Katherine Lu
THE ROLE OF COLLABORATION?
It takes three people to make one architect. You have the person who delivers the vision and ideas, the person who creates the project momentum, and the person who delivers. These three equal parts are crucial. Detailed design is the most important part; a good idea poorly executed is a rubbish building. And somebody always has to be pushing, pushing. And that’s just the architectural team. We’ve also got the builders, structural engineers, the interiors people, landscape designers – a range of consultants.
HOW DO YOU FIND YOUR CLIENTS?
They find us. Word of mouth, repeat clients, media, Instagram. Recently a US-based client found us Pinterest. It’s a curious process – where the work comes from. And we do a lot of collaborative work on city-scale projects with larger firms, where they will do the really big moves. So for example, they’ll run the feasibilities, and we’ll do the contextual thinking: Where does the building sit? How does this ‘make’ the edge of the city? Where does the sun penetrate? We’re currently working on a really beautiful 14-storey commercial building with a heritage component, on George Street, Sydney.
Annandale House. Photo: Katherine Lu
GAME-CHANGER Moments?
I’ve got two. The first one was having children (two boys) and realising that the architectural model, where the principal works 60 hours a week and has no personal life, was just not an option for us. I had to have a massive reset about what it means to run a practice, to deliver quality work, and also be a parent. That’s taught me the power of effective delegation, of getting people who are better at stuff than I am. I’m in my second game-changer now. COVID has given us amazing flexibility and suddenly there’s a breaking down of formality between home and work. Everyone is working on their own and setting their own working hours. It’s brilliant.
“People need to feel secure to take creative risks.”
THE ROLE OF TRUST?
I’m putting systems in place to deal with flexibility, and setting a clear decision-making framework for each project. Everyone’s stepping up and taking responsibility too. To step into confidence like that is amazing.
What does RISK TAKING MEAN TO YOU?
There’s always a risk when you invite (employ) someone new into the team. We have a system where I’ll do a first interview, which is the getting to know you ‘gut feeling’ interview. Then there’s a more skills-based interview with one of the architect leaders and a consultant HR person. Then we decide together if we’ve got a good marriage of gut and skill. With architecture you can be pretty sure during building that things will go wrong. It’s never rocket science to solve them, but there’s a relentlessness that’s needed, which can be stressful. We want our team to be a happy, humming, supportive place. People need to feel secure to take creative risks.
Cammeray House. Photo: Katherine Lu
LEARNING FROM MISTAKES?
Things can fail with a team, a project or a client. Everybody’s going to stuff up at some point, it’s how you deal with it that counts. That’s the measure of your upstanding-ness as a human.
Surry Hills House II. Photo: Katherine Lu
“Humour is the thing that can elevate projects to the next level.”
Surry Hills House II. Photo: Katherine Lu
HOW DO YOU MANAGE CLIENTS?
It’s a very different proposition and a different skillset dealing with private residential clients and commercial clients. There is often friction if a client partnership like a husband and wife, for example, have different points of view. Say we’re meeting a new client and we only meet one person in the couple, we’ll insist on meeting the other before taking on the commission. With a commercial/corporate client, it’s much more mediated by the process: they’ll come to you with a realistic budget that comes out of a quantity survey and you go from there.
Pastel shades in the Double Bay House. Photo: Katherine Lu
WHat are YOUR GOALS?
To be a really good architect. I want my work to be in service and I want to deliver with loving kindness. And, I want to have a happy family. That’s clear and simple enough of course, but it’s not easy.
Your BIGGEST CHALLENGE?
Sustainability – in our work and as a country. But, I’m incredibly heartened by how the world has came together to address COVID. There’s some ugly elements to that, in terms of the rich/poor divide, but we’ve demonstrated how quickly and effectively we can work as a (global) collective. We haven’t seen that before. Now, if we can just harness a bit of that to work together on climate change…
Inside the brick screens at Darlinghurst House. Photo: Katherine Lu
YOUR HARDEST LESSON?
I don’t know yet. I think it’s coming. I don’t think I’m wise enough. But… I’ve learned that the measure of one’s self is in the action after the failure, in finding the strength and courage and grace to fix the mistake, brush off the scabby knee, and move forward. Then as your confidence returns/grows, you can take larger risks creatively.
WHAT DO YOU WORRY ABOUT?
Climate change.
The steel mesh staircase at Darlinghurst House, a workshop conversion. Photo: Katherine Lu
WHERE TO FROM HERE?
While we’re collaborating on larger projects, we won’t be leaving the private house behind; it’s training in empathy, tactility, scale and resolution is amazing. The other great thing about working with houses, particularly heritage houses, is we can pull things apart and see how they were done in the past. I feel we’re generating a new language for all kinds of buildings.
tribestudio.com.au
