Baracco+Wright Architects
(est. 2004, Melbourne)

Founded in 2004, Baracco+Wright Architects is an architectural practice whose work exists between academia, architecture, art and landscape architecture. With a strong focus on the natural world and the re-use of existing buildings, it integrates landscape-based approaches into its decision-making.

Baracco+Wright Architects describes the original conception of its 2014 Garden House, located in Western Port in southern Victoria, as ‘just a little more than a tent’. Made from a mix of industrial steel and handmade timber, the structure comprises a deck and a raised platform covered by a transparent ‘shed’, with the interior perimeter ‘verandah’ featuring garden, spontaneous vegetation and dynamic living areas that interact with the natural elements around them. The site itself is left over from a heavily vegetated corridor between cleared grazing land, altered over time by domestic gardens, human activity and non-native animals and livestock. While small patches of endemic vegetation remain, such as tea-tree heath, introduced species and invasive weeds had begun to take over. The idea for the Garden House was for a modest structure intended to become a seamless part of an improved landscape and flourishing vegetation over time. The house is set on a low-lying site with terrestrial orchids and lilies; flood waters seasonally move through unimpeded and tea-trees have begun to grow inside the structure.

In 2018, in collaboration with Linda Tegg, Baracco+Wright Architects were creative directors of the Australian Pavilion at the 16th Venice Biennale of Architecture. In 2019, the firm was invited by Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator of the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), to exhibit in Broken Nature at the Milan Triennial. In 2022, they were guest editors for issue 56 of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, in a special edition exploring themes of architecture and nature. Baracco+Wright Architects has won several awards, including the Australian Institute of Architects’ Kevin Borland Award for Small Project Architecture in 2012, and the Harold Desbrowe-Annear Award for Residential Architecture – Houses (New) in 2017. In addition to its practice work, the firm also conducts research under the name B+W+.