Design and architecture superstars Kevin McCloud and Tim Ross took to the stage at Lindfield Learning Village’s Greenhalgh Theatre during their ‘Live in Interesting Places’ national tour on Saturday 14 February.

After their performance, they generously gave some words of wisdom for design and technology students in our public schools.

What inspires you as a designer or architect?

Tim Ross: The energy of people, what they create, their enthusiasm for what they do, their ability to explain and share their ideas with you. I think I'm always at my happiest when I'm meeting interesting people who are sharing ideas.

Kevin McCloud: People. I am at my happiest when my emotions and my imagination are sparked, and that can happen anywhere at any time. The thing about the imaginative spark and the emotional response to spaces is that it is not guaranteed in buildings, but it's usually pretty well guaranteed when you have an interesting conversation with somebody.

What advice do you have for a student who needs to start a design project?

Kevin McCloud: The interesting thing about architects and designers, and even the owners of so many of the buildings we visit, is that they just want to share.

Go and speak to somebody who really knows a project, or speak to a curator of a project that you admire, whatever your area of interest is, because you can't stop people talking once they start.

Tim Ross: If you need inspiration talking to people is the best, and books are always better than the internet. Not everything's online, and when you're flicking open a book and you're seeing a house from the 1990s that's not online, you're not consuming the same information your peers are consuming as well. I think that's really important because not everything is online.

Having a collection of high quality books that you can find in a second-hand store or in op shops is really useful.

Kevin McCloud: Absorbing the visual takes up so much bandwidth and it's a very particular part of the brain that does this. It's the same bit that reads books or listens to the radio, both of which are kind of really quite narrow bandwidth activities, leaving the imagination more room to play.

Are there any emerging trends you're seeing that you think is going to have an impact on future architecture and future design?

Tim Ross: Clearly better designed apartments. I think what we're going to see is this generation who understand apartments in a way that we've never had before. It’ll be the first real cohort of Australian architects who have grown up in apartments. They not only understand them, but have lived in them and want to make them better, rather than people from the suburbs with their own ideas of what an apartment should be. I think that's really exciting.

Kevin McCloud: The connection between landscape, between inside and outside, and along with zero carbon and issues around climate change, a degree of connectivity with the biosphere, physical connection, not just visual, and with every other species on the planet, really, that is, I think that's really important, and that's already happening in architecture.

Tim Ross: We spoke to some design and architecture students recently, and all of them listed community as most important. One of the architecture students we spoke had some pretty strong ideas about heritage and how the problems of the future are probably more important than holding on to the past. So I think being fierce and progressive, and being prepared to challenge the status quo is what we need in the future.

Is there a particular school or university building you particularly think shows good design?

Tim Ross: I like this one a lot! I'm very, very fond of Lindfield Learning Village. I also like the demountable, how this simple building that you can put on the back of a truck and take it to a school when it needs it and then take them away, is particularly Australian.

There was a time when the suburbs were expanding and there weren’t enough school buildings, and the government architect found a solution with the demountable, a wonderful modernist box.

Kevin McCloud: I was involved in a project about twenty-five years ago called Joined Up Design for Schools, where lots of designers and architects each worked with a school, and I worked with a school in a really deprived part of England, Falmouth in Cornwall.

It was a small school trying to keep a community together. We had kids coming in at 6.30 in the morning for breakfast. The school provided social and family support and even washed some of the kids' clothes. It was an amazing experience to see the kids, because they were on fire. They loved it.

The Lindfield Learning Village building was designed by David Turner in 1968 and won the Sulman Award for Architecture in 1978. After housing various tertiary institutions over the years, it became the Lindfield Learning Village — a K–12 school — in 2019.