ANNEMARIE LOPEZ profiles a prodigious artist/architect obsessed with love and town planning in an age of terrorism...

Richard Goodwin believes terrorism, or more precisely the fear of terrorism, is putting us at risk of creating oppressive and alienating urban spaces that reduce social interaction and, even worse, stop us falling in love. This is an oversimplification of course. Goodwin’s theories cannot easily be reduced to log lines, slogans or aphorisms. They are the result of more than 30 years spent pacing the boundary between art and architecture, trying to locate the points where one practice can speak to the other, make sense of the other, enrich the other. On a crisp winter afternoon in Goodwin’s Leichhardt studio, surrounded by the accretion of objects from his life’s practice — motorcycle parts, concrete slabs, scale models — Goodwin sketches his hypotheses in the air. The ideal place for this discussion might have been the helicopter cockpit attached to a wall above his studio courtyard — a parasite structure of Goodwin’s invention — but when Goodwin is explaining ‘porosity’, the momentum of his thought train is unstoppable.

Richard Goodwin, What a Building Desires, 2005, digital media, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist funded by the Australian Research Council. Computer graphics by Robert Beson.

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