Richard Maddock

I grew up on a farm in Tasmania, surrounded by landscape, materials, and machinery. From a young age, I had an affinity for timber and began making and selling wooden products at the age of 16. I exclusively used Tasmanian special species timber, producing a hundred CD racks, as well as numerous other unique, handcrafted items such as jewellery boxes and clocks. However, my first degree was in engineering, and for a decade I worked for companies such as Porsche and IBM, until I eventually decided to return to university and study architecture. I haven’t looked back since. For the last decade I have been working as an architect at Foster + Partners in London, designing timber projects all around the world.

I’m fascinated by the beauty, craft, and structural wonder of Japanese carpentry, thus the thesis of my Churchill Fellowship was to explore the potential for the wider use of traditional Japanese wood-only joints in modern construction. I studied traditional timber joinery as practised by expert carpenters, and learned from experts researching and producing innovative wood buildings produced by digital robotic fabrication. My goal is to meld these two forms of construction. One is ancient and based on millennia of learning, the other juvenile and ready to heed the lessons of the past.