Phillip Gibbs

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Phillip Gibbs (b. 1940) is an Australian architect. In 1980 he was awarded the third place prize at the Shinkenchiku Residential Design Competition for work on his Australian timber house.

He graduated with a degree in Architecture from Melbourne University in 1966 and an additional degree in Architecture and Planning from McGill University in 1971.

In 1984, he was appointed Visiting Scholar in Architecture at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. He practiced architecture in Perth and Fremantle and worked with the Corringie Aboriginal community, Leonora, Western Australia, and the Swan River Valley Noongar (or Nyungah) community.

He is the author of 'Building a Malay House', Oxford University Press 1987, ISBN 0-19-588861-8.

Phillip Gibbs is distinguished from other architects by a capacity for conducting research into methods of architectural form generation and has demonstrated that geometry is the basis of all form generation techniques. In general, this discipline is no longer practiced. In the early 21st Century, architecture is understood as comprising stylistic effects that are applied externally to a building structure that has been dictated by engineering and economic constraints. This approach established itself over the 20th Century. Before then the discipline of architecture concerned the generation of building form through artfully applied geometric principles, as well as accommodating the engineering and economic realities of their time. The form generation methods identified by Phillip Gibbs reveal the depth of cultural achievement of the Western architectural styles exhibited by 16th through 19th Century buildings.

A rare and widely recognised example of form generation though application of geometric principles is the Sydney Opera House.

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