Luigi & Raffaello Rosselli
The two of us
Interview by Peter Salhani | Photography by Prue Ruscoe, Mark Syke, Richard Carr, Ben Hosking, Edward Birch, Justin Alexander
Luigi Rosselli and Raffaello Rosselli are from a family of artists, engineers and makers. Both are architects in Sydney, Australia. It took time, and a stint in Vietnam, before Raffaello could work with his father Luigi; in the prodigal spirit, he would forge his own path first. Now their two practices sometimes merge in a purpose-built studio in the back streets of Surry Hills. Father and son talk about working together and learning from each other.
What was your childhood like?
Luigi: My childhood was spent in the urban landscape of Milan. It was culturally very interesting, we were surrounded by architectural icons. My father was an engineer, we knew Gio Ponti and people like that – a lucky landscape for an architect. My brother had one of the first Lego sets in the 1960s. We shared a room and used to have competitions designing and building bridges with his Lego.
Raffaello: I mostly grew up in Sydney, except for a year in Switzerland as a toddler, with my Italian cousins; so my first words were in Italian. I was the oldest of three kids. We grew up without a TV, which annoyed me, because I couldn’t talk with my friends about the latest cartoons. But it meant I spent a lot of time outside playing and making art.
“I thought a profession that allowed me to draw would be great.”
Architect Luigi Rosselli. Photo: Prue Ruscoe
What led you into architecture?
Luigi: In high school we had a few art teachers who were failed architects – in that they couldn’t get a job. They’d set us assignments for designing houses and architectural elements. I enjoyed drawing, I still do. I thought a profession that allowed me to draw would be great. However, in post-revolution Italy, the University of Milano was a disaster. But because of our family connections in Switzerland (my mother is Swiss French) I went to study at the Polytechnique Lausanne, a smaller and much better resourced university. While studying I spent a year with working Mario Botta Architetti, then to New York to work with Romaldo Giurgola, who was commissioned to design the Australian Parliament House. That led me to Canberra for a year (in 1980), then back to Lausanne to finish my studies. In my final year I married an Australian, and we returned to Sydney.
Raffaello: As a kid I was always making sculptures from found objects. My mother is an artist, and for a time we lived in Clovelly [a Sydney beachside suburb] near an artist friend of the family who had the best collection of industrial steel relics in her garage. That all really inspired me. I was always on the lookout for random objects to drag home. I liked the solitary side of making sculpture, and the discovery of finding objects to work with. At some point I guess I thought of architecture as a kind of large-scale art. At the end of school and before university, I did a three-month sculpture intensive at the Atelier des Beaux Arts in Paris. That was instrumental in defining a process of making and using my hands. Then I returned to study architecture at Sydney University.
“I liked the solitary side of making sculpture... and the discovery of finding objects to work with.”
Raffaello Rosselli. Photo: Luigi Rosselli
What was your first project?
Raffaello: In my final year of uni I did The Tin Shed project in Redfern – a small granny flat and home-office. I got the job because when I met the client, I made a plea to keep the existing rusty steel-clad shed, when every (actual) architect she spoke with wanted to demolish it. So, with no experience, I got the job through my love of the ‘found object’. I’d ridden past the shed every day on my way to uni; it was my favourite building in a rapidly gentrifying Redfern. Its rusty tacked-on steel sheets had a great sense of time and history. We found a way to keep that in the design, and re-use the sheets. It showed you can make a connection between materials and history, and still respond to the client and site condition.
Tin Shed in Redfern by Raffaello Rosselli Architects. Photo (above): Mark Syke; (below) Richard Carr
Luigi: In Australia I had to work for two years to get accreditation. The first year I worked on Parliament House in Canberra for Romaldo Giurgola, who’d opened an office for the project. I was thrown into being team leader for the forecourt design. Every decision was very public, and had to be reported to the Senate Committee. Then I did a year in a small office with Furio Valich, a very good craftsman of Croatian origin. In 1985, I started my practice with the fit-out for an advertising agency inside an old butcher’s shop. A few more small projects followed, then the office fit-out for Leo Schofield, who was head of a large advertising agency, and a prominent Sydney food critic and taste-maker.
Early influences?
Luigi: Romalda Giurgola taught me a lot from his modesty. Even working on Australia’s Parliament House, he’d ask everybody, including students, what we thought. He was very patient. So I learnt how to deal with associates and colleagues and staff. Then in my year with Furio Valich, very quickly I learnt the ropes of running a small practice.
Raffaello: Early in my career, my partner and I moved to Vietnam for her work. I got a job in Hanoi with Vo Trong Nghia, before he was well known. I learnt a lot from him. He started using bamboo – a material associated with poor construction – in beautiful ways, in high-end projects like luxury resorts and houses. When his work became famous, it completely switched the narrative of bamboo from a material of poverty to being desirable. That made me realise any material can be valued, with good design. Coming back to Australia, I wanted to use my architecture to help redefine the worth of materials.
Highlighting the problem of waste, Plastic Palace by Raffaello Rosselli with artist brother Adriano Rosselli, was a temporary installation in Albury, NSW where a translucent geotextile skin encased waste plastic consumer goods salvaged from local tips. Photo: Ben Hosking
The game-changer?
Luigi: In 1989, two musicians from INXS contacted me (separately) to design their houses. They didn’t know that I was doing both their houses for some time, but when they found out, I had to reassure them that both houses were quite different. One was a bush house on the Hawkesbury River, the other was an addition to a 1930s brick duplex. I designed all the furniture for both of them – beds, lights, tables, cubby house. They were published in 1991 in Vogue Living and Architect Australia [AA]. Davina Jackson wrote the AA article calling the houses ‘baroque architecture’ and that I was an elitist architect, only designing for stars. So for three years, I got no phone calls. But after that, clients came.
Homage to Oscar (Niemeyer), a Sydney villa addition by Luigi Rosselli Architects. Photo: Prue Ruscoe
“For three years I got no phone calls. but after that, clients came.”
—Luigi Rosselli Photo: John Gollings
Raffaello: The Tin Shed project. It got a lot of media attention for a few years. It was quite a confrontational project because it challenged people’s ideas about beauty and newness. But I’d say The Beehive has been a game-changer because it more fully expresses my ideas about material re-use. It was also my first collaboration with Luigi. It’s a small commercial building where we now both have our studios.
“we saved roof tiles from landfill and turned them into a brise soleil facade for the studio.”
—Raffaello Rosselli Photo: Prue Ruscoe
What ideas were you testing with The Beehive?
Raffaello: I wanted to re-use materials in more than just a visual way. I started visiting waste management centres to get an understanding of what materials go to waste, and quickly identified the terracotta roof tile as interesting. There is a market for re-using much older tiles, but the newer ones just go to landfill. Luigi had a renovation project where the house was being re-roofed; the builder said it would be more economical for him to send the tiles to us than to junk them and pay tip fees. So we saved those tiles from landfill and turned them into a beautiful brise soleil. It screens the building’s only glass facade from western sun, and has a beautiful cooling and light-filtering effect inside. I’ve also developed a recycled plastic sheet material that expresses its constituent elements, like terrazzo. We created furniture out of these sheets for the office, along with various other furniture prototypes. The recycled plastic meeting table allows clients to see and feel first-hand that even valueless plastic can be used to create something beautiful.
Top floor deck of The Beehive in Surry Hills, Sydney by Raffaello Rosselli & Luigi Rosselli. Photo: Prue Ruscoe
On collaborating together?
Luigi: Raffaello wanted to do that with one foot firmly on the ground, so he gained experience with other practices first. That was wise. When he eventually came to work with my office, we had a project (the Tama T House) which had been designed, but all the documentation and approvals still had to be done. That was so he might learn the ropes of how to do a tender, and manage a builder on site, etc. So by the time The Beehive project began, we were both comfortable with the idea of collaborating together. The Beehive – certainly its big idea – was Raffaello’s, and I was ‘the client’.
Raffaello: I knew there was a lot to learn from Luigi, being a master architect, but I avoided working together for a long time. I worked with other practices for seven years beforehand. When I returned from Vietnam, I decided it was now or never. The Beehive project came along at just the right time. It was a good collaboration. Now I’m either doing my own projects, or we go for larger projects together.
“The main thing Raffaello made me realise... its that we have been very wasteful in buildings and materials for a long time.”
What have you learnt from each other?
Raffaello: Luigi has taught me a lot about how to work as an architect, and how to trust my instincts. He’s very sure of himself and his approaches. His support, especially when I’m experimenting, has been instrumental in me exploring my own ideas.
Luigi: The main thing Raffaello has made me realise, and maybe it’s generational, is that we have been very wasteful in our buildings and in materials for a long time. Now, thanks to Raffaello, I go out of my way to help clients make their brief work well with the existing building.
The Great Wall of WA, in the Pilbara, by Luigi Rosselli Architects is Australia’s longest rammed earth construction. It encloses twelve earth-covered residences – short-term accommodation for a cattle station during mustering season. Photo: Edward Birch
Your biggest challenge as an architect?
Luigi: I spent the first half of my practice years quite isolated – going against the trends of the times. And sometimes looked down on as a European import. That was a challenge. Today the challenge is basically trying to evolve in respect of the environmental situation. And I’d like to be an example. A lot of architects have declared a climate emergency, while still producing massive concrete houses. Now wherever possible, instead of concrete, we use rammed earth, or if we must use concrete for strength, it has to be low-CO2 concrete, which produces about half the emissions.
“A lot of architects declare a climate emergency, while still producing massive concrete houses.”
Raffaello: The things that define our times: the environmental and climate crisis, and how architects assess our part in that. The impact of producing materials for construction far exceeds the energy consumed in occupying that building over its lifetime. While some focus mainly on using technologies (eg: solar panels) to mitigate the effects, my focus is to get the embodied energy down as much as possible. One way is through material re-use, the other is through using local materials. In the current Coronavirus crisis, self-sufficiency is more important that ever, so a positive benefit of the crisis could be the reigniting of local manufacturing.
Plastic Palace by Raffaello Rosselli and brother Adriano Rosselli – a temporary installation of waste plastic from local (Albury NSW). Photo: Jeremy Weihrauch
What kind of father was Luigi?
Raffaello: He was very hard working. He led by example. As an immigrant, he had to work harder to succeed. He wasn’t a very talkative father, but we would bond through making things. We spent a lot of time as kids on holidays building cubby houses out of rocks and sticks and stuff that we found. I think that really was a formative thing for me in architecture. And it’s often what makes me look for a bit of whimsy in my designs. While modern architecture demands precision, my childhood constructions were very haphazard. I like referencing that – finding solutions with less strict tolerances, as long as they’re done in a way that considers the imprecision. Like my Tin Shed project, which was actually designed to have sheets of rusty iron added to it over time.
Below left: Father and son Raffaello and Luigi Rosselli moving mountains. Centre: Raffaello and younger brother Adriano, now a sculptor and art curator in Berlin. Right: Cubby house adventures.
What kind of a boy was Raffaello?
Luigi: Very creative. And always quite an individual. He communicated through his creativity, not so well in words. He had many friends, they were attracted to his creativity. He had trouble reading at the beginning. But now he’s a great reader.
Are you strongly connected to your Italian heritage?
Raffaello: Exploring materials is a way of identifying with my heritage. There’s a traditional Italian process of using off-cut marble and concrete – Palladiana marble – that I’m investigating having made here. It’s like terrazzo but on a bigger scale. Re-using materials dates back to classical Roman, even classical Greek architecture – they call it spolia.
Furniture by Raffaello Rosselli made from his recycled plastic sheeting.
Luigi Rosselli Architects’ Village House in Sydney harnesses the thermal mass of rammed earth walls. Photo: Justin Alexander
What drives you?
Raffaello: In 2019 I had a sudden critical health issue. I spent a month in hospital and when I got out all wanted to do was spend time in nature to recover, but the bushfires kept me indoors. That period had a strong effect on me; it galvanised my resolve to make architecture sustainable, and have materials strongly define my practice. I’ve also been teaching design studio on material exploration, and seeing students doing the most amazing work in the re-use of materials. There’s a lot of potential for cradle-to-cradle material use, and we’re only just beginning.
Succah by the Sea, by Raffaello Rosselli and Adriano Rosselli, ironically reimagines the ancient rituals of temporary shelter in sandstone. It was created for the 2019 Sculpture by the Sea festival in Bondi. Its use of monumental sandstone blocks questions modern society’s fetish for disposability.
What’s next?
Raffaello: Currently I’m doing a small after-school space project for City of Sydney that will use some of our recycled plastics in interesting ways. I’m in conversations with several companies about making building materials from local waste streams. My partner Elsa and I also collaborate – she works with the Institute of Sustainable Futures at UTS. And Luigi and I are collaborating (with a French architect) on additions to a French school in Sydney’s south east. It’s nice for me to bring work to Luigi, instead of the other way around.
