The Architect's Dream
An exhibition and research project about the interior life of architectural imagination — and what happens when you try to make that visible.
The Architect’s Dream, The Sleep of Reason began as a question about what architects actually see when they imagine a building. Not the elevation or the section — those are translations, representations of something more immediate. The question was whether that something more immediate could be made inhabitable by someone else.
The project has taken several forms since then: an exhibition, a paper, a series of public presentations. It was shown at Melbourne Design Week and Adelaide Design Week 2025, developed in collaboration with RMIT, and supported by AASA Creative Practice Funding. The paper — The Architect’s Dream, The Sleep of Reason — was presented at Creative Economies and Education 2 (CEE2) in 2025.
The project
The title
The title does two things at once. The Architect’s Dream is a painting — Thomas Cole’s 1840 canvas in which a reclining architect dreams of a landscape populated by every major architectural style in history, simultaneously, as if style itself were a kind of sleep. The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters is Goya’s aquatint from 1799: an artist slumped at a desk, owls and bats emerging from the darkness behind him.
Melbourne and Adelaide
The CEE2 paper
What this has to do with teaching
The connection to my teaching practice is not incidental. The same questions about imagination, representation, and inhabitation that drive this project are the questions SiteSeer is trying to answer from a different direction. SiteSeer asks: what do students need to understand about a building they can’t visit? The Architect’s Dream asks: what does it feel like to be inside an architect’s imagination? Both are trying to make something that was previously private or inaccessible available to someone else.