Scaling Impact | Ar. Nic Brunsdon on Civic & Regenerative Design

One perspective, applied at every scale. Architecture is a storytelling industry — even the smallest project needs a big idea. Our studio’s rule is simple: leave things better than we found them, or don’t touch them.

We’re B Corp certified, held to independently verified standards on social and environmental performance. That discipline runs through everything, civic or private.

The link between the two roles is Space Market, a venture I started fifteen years ago connecting disused Perth spaces with people who could use them. It got me thinking seriously about civic engagement — and led straight to the City Architect role

I’d just moved back to Perth after time in the Middle East and Melbourne, and started noticing vacant space everywhere. You only have three options with anything you don’t like: leave it, accept it, or change it. If you can’t leave it, accept it. If you can’t accept it, change it. Anything else is just cynicism. The people who change things are the people who do something.

Metropolitan Perth’s golf courses cover roughly 1,153 hectares — about 2% of the suburban core — much of it water-intensive and lightly used. “Fair Way” keeps golf but shrinks its footprint, folding in native parkland, medium-density housing, habitat restoration, urban farming and hospitality that connects food production directly to dining. It draws on Caring for Country and the Noongar six-season cycle, responding to water scarcity and food security with a flexible kit of parts — orchards, greenhouses, rainwater harvesting — that can adapt across sites.

Tejakula is remote — three hours from the airport — without central Bali’s construction sophistication, but with real authenticity. I didn’t want to arrive as an outside architect imposing a foreign solution, or simply copy what was already there. So we worked with what the region does well: concrete and bamboo, everywhere. Bamboo became the formwork; its texture is left imprinted in the concrete’s patina as the project’s motif.

Walls act as funnels, giving every room an equal view of ocean and mountain — a deliberate way of grounding guests, most of whom had just traveled fifteen-plus hours to get there. The project went on to win World Architecture Festival’s Best Hotel and a Dezeen Award.

Harder than it looks. The brief drew on David Foster Wallace’s story of two young fish asked how the water is — a way of making air, something always present but rarely noticed, visible again after COVID. The sphere’s volume matches the air one person breathes in a year, and it physically inhales and exhales, picking up wind from the garden as it moves.

It’s a double-skin structure — an outer skin that breathes, an inner skin that stays inflated for safety — sitting on a heavy ballast above a car park. As it deflated, children would sit underneath it, folded into an accidental hug.

Roughly 80% of the buildings the world needs by 2050 are already built. The future isn’t new construction — it’s reuse. As materials and labour get more expensive, the big civic gesture — the monument, the concert hall — stops solving problems. We already have access to great music without importing an orchestra.

Civic design now needs to serve the many, not the few: long-life, loose-fit buildings that can adapt as needs change. We’ll always need shelter, and we’ll always want to gather in person. The real shift is getting comfortable with what we don’t yet know.