Winners of many awards, including the Wilkinson and Robin Boyd Residential Housing Awards (twice) ... Durbach Block Jaggers have a series of tight, luminescent projects to their name. A small office of eight, they are a practice that tackles residential projects, toilet blocks and major public spaces with equal vigour. Indeed, every horizontal surface of their office in Sydney's CBD is littered with half-finished, half-painted models; that could be a house on a cliff, an art gallery in Perth, or studies of glowing toilet blocks. These bending and arcing balsa models, painted shades of green and blue, are representative of their search for the elegant solution; the model or sketch that captures the idea of the project perfectly.

This restless search for directness and solidity gives the practice an output that is consistently inventive across all projects. Their buildings frame and represent the landscape in an inventive and unforeseen manner.

For us, "there is a rightness or resonance of a particular design, an ease of fit, which gives the design a sense of unexpected inevitability....We are attempting a determined simplicity, a directness of strategy, a transparency of idea. We believe in an architecture that is not afraid of beauty or spareness or modesty."

As appeared in Mark Another Architecture #5. Dec 2006/Jan 2007. Determined Simplicity.