Professor Marcus White

Biography

Professor Marcus White is an award-winning architect and urban designer, co-director of Harrison and White Pty Ltd, and Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the Swinburne University of Technology. He leads the Spatio-Temporal Research Urban Design and Architecture Lab (STRUDAL) in the Centre for Design Innovation.

Marcus has been the recipient of numerous design awards including the RAIA Haddon Travelling Scholarship, the AIA Victorian Emerging Architect Award, the inaugural AIA National Emerging Architect Award for his “contribution to architectural practice, education, design excellence and community involvement, which advances the profession’s role within the public arena”, the Graham Treloar Fellowship for his research project - Urban street tree shade analysis using high polygon 3D models with MR photometric daylight systems and was recently awarded a National Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning.

Marcus has led numerous significant design projects working with practices in Melbourne and through his own studio of Harrison and White. He was a design architect working with Lyons Architects, MVS, Maddison Architects, and NMBW, on the RMIT ‘New Academic Street’ renovation project for buildings 8, 10, 12, 14, in Melbourne, which received the Victorian Architecture Medal, the Melbourne Prize, The Joseph Reed Award for Urban Design, the Henry Bastow Award for Educational Architecture, the Interior Architecture Award, the Sustainable Architecture Award in 2018. The project also recently won both the AIA (National) Urban Design Award and the AIA (National) Jackson Educational Architecture Award.

Marcus’ urban design project ‘Implementing the Rhetoric’ was one of only 16 projects from Australia to be selected for inclusion in the 2010 Venice Biennale. The project explored undiluted transit-oriented development coexisting with solar amenity preservation; agent-based pedestrian connectivity modelling; and density distribution surface modelling; using parametric urban modelling. The project has since been exhibited at the: Gallery of Australian Design, Canberra, Australia – (Feb/Mar 2012); Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts (KMoFA), Kaohsiung, Taiwan, (Jun/ Sept 2012); Hong Kong Central Library, Hong Kong, (Oct 2012); Studio X, Kitab Mahal Mumbai, India, (Nov/Dec 2012); Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology Bengaluru, India, (Dec 2012); Coimbatore Centre for Contemporary Arts Coimbatore, India, (Dec 2012); Vibrant Gujarat Gandhi Nagar, India, (Jan 2013); and India International Centre Annexe #40 New Delhi, India, (Jan 2013).

Marcus completed his PhD at RMIT Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory in collaboration with MGS Architects in 2009. His PhD focused on sustainable urban design solutions using custom digital design techniques within architectural practice. His work has been used to inform Smart Growth and Transit Oriented Development policies for various council urban design frameworks, including City of Whitehorse, City of Stonnington, City of Maribyrnong and City of Melbourne.