Publisher: Uro Publications, 2026, ISBN: 9781922601469, Authors: James Grose, Andrew Mackenzie and Melanie Mury, Format: Hardback, 210 x 300mm, 600pp
Architecture, like photography, is shaped by myriad rules and conventions. When these conventions combine within an architecture book, they tend to narrow the ambitions for what it might contain—heroic angles, manicured scenography, depopulated space and blue skies. Beautiful, lifeless space.
BVN, Becoming: Stories of Time and Place is a modest attempt to realign what matters when we talk about architecture. Ostensibly a survey of the work of BVN—one of Australia’s most significant and enduring architectural practices, now in its centenary year—it is more properly a book about people, place, and the slow accumulation of belonging. Buildings are understood not as fixed objects but as dynamic entities, constantly transforming, becoming embedded in the rhythms of daily life.
Essays by Archie Moore, Esther Anatolitis, James Grose, Andrew Mackenzie and Kevin O’Brien are woven together with poems by Agatha Gothe-Snape and Jaimee Edwards, and Les Murray’s landmark 1984 poem ’Louvres’. Feature photography by Agnieszka Chabros and Banjo McLachlan captures fleeting moments within BVN’s buildings—chance, circumstance, and the passing of the day. The pages of Archie Moore and Kevin O’Brien’s section carry a commissioned fragrance by scentsmith Ainslie Walker, evoking the olfactory memory of Country.
Designed by Stuart Geddes and Žiga Testen, Becoming offers an alternative to the conventional monograph: a book closer in spirit to a novel than a fan deck of buildings, revealing architecture as it is lived.