10 minutes with… Matthews Architects managing director Gerald Matthews
SA architecture firm Matthews Architects this year celebrates half a century in business. Business Insight spoke to the CEO, Gerald Matthews, about the milestone.
50 years in business is quite a milestone. How did Matthews Architects last this long?
I don’t think there are any cheat-codes when it comes to an architectural practice succeeding for half a century. It is the byproduct of a set of principles and practices that take expertise, passion and effort. Matthews Architects is a practice that focuses on lasting quality over fast fashion and that applies to our processes as well as our design outcomes. There is no mystery to what delivers this; it is the result of a high-quality team.
We try to keep our focus on our current projects. The most powerful kind of professional ambition, in my opinion, is the ambition to create the best outcome for the project you’re currently working on. Reputations in our profession aren’t static; they must be continuously earned. Finished successful projects are the best measure.
Successful projects usually result in, or result from, great relationships. I think as a team we have always valued those relationships far more than the transactional aspect of our professional services. This has allowed us to recognise and unlock opportunities for our clients that might otherwise have been overlooked, unexplored or unimagined.
Looking back over the decades of my career, it is also easy to recognise how much we’ve learned from our clients. To design a specific kind of building it’s important to learn from the experts about what will make it succeed, and they are often the clients themselves. Our ability to see the project from a client’s perspective has helped us adapt to suit a wide range of clients and projects; including highly complex projects, which are deeply enjoyable to work on for us, and projects with challenging financial constraints.
What sets the business apart from your competitors?
Matthews Architects very deliberately doesn’t have a house style. We believe that style should come from a designer working in concert with a client, rather than being dictated by what a firm’s projects are expected to look like.
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For us, substance must always come before style. This includes functionality, practicality, constructability and affordability. It was for this reason that we developed a professional development model that starts with cultivating a strong technical foundation for every team member.
Our broad technical expertise has also made us comfortable and highly capable when working with complex briefs and complex sites. For us, the goal is not to reduce the complexities into dangerous over-simplifications, but rather to embrace the complexities and design elegant solutions.
The depth of collaboration that we enjoy with our clients has also armed us with an ability to find connections between research and the real world. A great example of this are areas of psychological research that have enabled us to create transformative education spaces and work environments.
What’ve been some of your favourite projects to come out of the firm over the years?
My favourite projects have typically been the ones that created a broader change. A good example of this was the CMI Toyota Adelaide building on West Terrace. As far as I know, this was the first time in Australia that an automotive service workshop was positioned in the most high-profile position on a dealership site. It didn’t just change the physical appearance of mechanics workshops; it was also an unspoken promise of transparency to customers.
Several of the early projects of Matthews Architects were the formative stages in the creation of Burnside Village. The transformative idea behind it transcended any notion of a suburban shopping mall, it really was about creating the heart of a village that the community itself would breathe life into.
One of our more recent projects that has already left a lasting mark on our practice was the revitalisation of St Peter’s College’s Big Quad Precinct. It is a heritage listed precinct that includes multiple buildings of different areas and styles that frame a quadrangle. The research we undertook for that project in relation to the psychology of time-orientation helped us shape spaces that forge very tangible connections between past, present and future. There is no shortage of living history in the design, grounding the spatial experience with the past. What we added to that are many small but lovely moments that encourage occupants to re-centre themselves in the present from time to time. There are also experiential elements that encourage students to think positively about the future and the natural passage of time.
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What’ve been the biggest challenges faced by the business over the 50 years?
Architecture and economics are very closely linked, but in ways that are not always obvious. When economic conditions tighten, we have been fortunate to find that these are the times that we are perhaps of most value to insightful clients. When project viability is thin, it is usually through effort in design that success is found. This makes a good architect one of the most valuable resources in tough times.
About 15 years ago, generational succession was a challenging process. At the time it felt a bit like trying to change drivers while a car is travelling at speed. I think about it very differently now – succession feels like something that must always be happening in some way, a constant process of renewal. Our leadership team is a crucial part of this. Each of them brings new ideas as well as unique capabilities.
One of the challenges that we continue to face as a profession globally is the decline in technical knowledge amongst architects. The challenge is made more pronounced by the speed at which buildings and building requirements have increased in complexity. Our response to this was to create a clear professional development model, that takes graduates as they are after five years of university, and begins by immersing them in codes and standards, then construction processes and contracts, then materials and detailing, then professional skills such as team leadership and project management before eventually returning years later to hone creative skills. What we quickly discovered is that most graduates of architecture crave this kind of process and the knowledge it delivers. They want to build the genuine skills that will give them confidence to create quality buildings, and not just pretty pictures.
While we see other practices having their scope of services progressively reduced, with many no longer engaged meaningfully during the construction process, it is gratifying to feel that we have set ourselves apart by preserving and enhancing skills that we believe deliver valuable outcomes and great return on investment in professional services for clients. I believe we consistently demonstrate that projects that are architecturally lead from start to finish can be smooth, enjoyable and highly successful.
How is business today? What’s the company working on?
This is shaping up to be a busy year with an excellent mix of work across almost every sector. We prefer to keep a healthy mix of project scales within our work. Over the years this has been the key to maintaining stability within the practice. The small and fast projects usually fit in amongst the gaps that naturally occur in larger slower projects. This also helps to ensure team members continuously have variety in their work. Tight-knit team collaboration and lateral support is essential to make this work.
At the moment, our work includes two apartment buildings (one high-rise and one heritage adaptation), a small number of multi-residential projects, two medical centres, a hospital expansion, a mix of commercial and retail properties and a range of education projects, including tertiary campus projects. I think the only sector that we are not actively working in is defence.
We occasionally work on private residential projects and have recently finished a substantial one. To ensure these types of projects receive the focus they require, we only allow any team member to work on one private residence at a time.
What’s next for the company?
Almost a decade ago, I read a paper titled “Architectural specialisation and the death of architectural practice” (by P. Raisbeck and K. Day) which seemed to be pondering a concern that had been circulating for a while in the architecture profession: with diminishing fees, diminishing professional scope, declining technical knowledge and other professions undertaking roles that were once the responsibility of architects, eventually would the only practices to survive be large firms with narrow specialisations engaged under builder-led delivery models or sole-practicing architects with low overhead costs? Was the long history of medium-sized practices coming to an end?
I believe we are proof that it is not. We have done this by first proving that architecturally led projects are successful when they are delivered by comprehensively skilled professionals and that there is a kind of professional service, responsiveness and collaboration that medium sized businesses can provide that can never be matched by large scale enterprises.
The future for us has never been about expansionism for its own sake. We are large enough to undertake large projects and small enough to work closely with clients. Over the years we’ve had the privilege of working on projects in every state and territory except for Tasmania and the ACT; I very much hope that we’ll eventually be able to demonstrate our capabilities there as well. As a home-base, Adelaide has the advantage of being (sort of) in the middle, so geographic reach has never been a challenge for us; even less so now that the world is more comfortable with online collaboration since the pandemic.
