In ngunnawal Country, the 2025 Emerging Architect Prize Tour arrived in Canberra with Mark Brooks of MyMyMy Architecture offering a candid account of what it actually takes to build a practice from scratch. Rather than a portfolio presentation, Mark shared the unglamorous realities: that it took five years before he felt established, that the business is as important as the architecture even when it isn't as fun, that with staff your work becomes mentoring and bringing in projects rather than making them, and that tracking time honestly is the only way to stop lying to yourself about profitability. What grounded all of it was a clarity about why — to build a culture around craft and collaboration, on his own terms — and a frank acknowledgement that the practice cannot continue if he isn't well. That last point connected directly to themes I've been exploring around limits, care, and what it means to sustain a practice ethically over time.

A photograph of Canberra taken from the taxi window by Kali

The Q&A in Canberra had a quality of its own — engaged and curious, drawing connections across scales and geographies. A rich thread emerged around density, flexibility, and design for change: Mark's staged masterplan approach, with plumbing points built in and expensive cores designed to function in multiple ways, rhymed closely with lessons from incremental housing in informal settlements and ideas around flexibility for guests and changing house users Theresa and I are trying to build into built-form design principles for public housing (for example, the idea of corridors wide enough for guests to sleep in or to convert into a playroom or study). The contrast between apartment typologies that offer no adaptive potential and the deep spatial creativity of communities working within constraints kept resurfacing. Mark answered by asking about the designer’s role, “How can you set [designs] up for a future that you don’t know? How can you leave space for things that you get wrong and allow for editing?” Vyasa McPherson's question landed well as a provocation to close on: "What patterns already exist in Canberra, and what can we learn from them?"