Gecko Environment Council is pleased to announce our Gecko Talk for May will be 'Biophilia...more marketing spin or the key to making a beautiful and liveable city? presented by Philip Follent, Follent Architecture.

Philip Follent, Life Fellow of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects, has been a State director of Architecture Awards, National Juror for the AIA Awards and for the ALIA Libraries of Australia design excellence awards 2017, 2019 and 2021.

His architectural practice has wone over 30 architecture and planning awards. Philip was declared 1996 Lecturer of the Year at Queensland University of Technology across all campuses and received the excellence in teaching award in the School of Sustainable Development and Architecture at Bond University in 2012.

Philip was City of Gold Coast Council’s first City Architect and was appointed Queensland Government Architect in 2008. He was the inaugural chair of the Queensland Board for Urban Places, inaugural member of the Queensland Design Council and the Founding Head of the Soheil Abedian School of Architecture at Bond University.

Philip has been acknowledged by the profession in bestowing his name perpetually to the Philip Follent Building of the Year for Gold Coast Northern Rivers RAIA Architecture Awards.

The now famous Open House program which opens buildings once a year for public appreciation of behind-the-scenes stories about architecture and heritage was jointly initiated by Philip and the BDA in 2009. It has grown across Queensland as the strongest publicly accessible annual architecture event.

Philip’s engagement with Arup on the Macintosh Island bridge as a collaborative engineering, architectural and landscape addition to the public realm is a simple but successful example of raising the benchmark of civic infrastructure.

Philip’s advocacy for a better built environment, along with his acknowledged expertise in master planning, education, architecture and engagement with indigenous communities (for example, the PIA and AIA multi-awarded MYAC indigenous eco-cultural infrastructure project, Cairns) has enabled indigenous, local and state entities to achieve quality assets of long-term benefit and civic pride.