Melbourne launch—Baroque Tendencies: The Making of Northcote House

Join architects and authors Paul Loh, David Leggett, and respondent Donald Bates in Melbourne for the launch of Baroque Tendencies: The Making of Northcote House (Uro Publications, 2025).

Northcote House is a strikingly singular building. Designed and built by David Leggett and Paul Loh—two design practitioners who operate in a fertile confluence between architecture, academia and fabrication—it represents a grand experiment in using digital manufacturing tools to transform the art and craft of construction. Both machinic and handcrafted, shockingly new and yet strangely familiar, Northcote House’s highly expressive, almost baroque form is the product of these tools, which rarely, if ever, make it outside university fabrication laboratories onto building sites.

Baroque Tendencies explores how and why this house came to be. It is a manual and a manifesto. A ‘How-to of Digital Fabrication’, it details the novel techniques Leggett and Loh used to fabricate, construct and assemble the house. In the process, it shows how this blend of conventional construction practice with digital fabrication achieves efficiencies in material use, spatial organisation and positive environmental impacts.

Leggett and Loh argue that their particular mode of design and construction, what they call ‘digital material practice’, is neither theory nor practice, but rather an engaged form of design research. In this book, they share the knowledge they have gleaned from their work with practitioners, architecture students and anyone interested in how architecture has taken an unexpected turn towards the baroque.

When: 6pm Thursday 13 November 2025

Where: Bookshop by Uro, 5/30 Perry Street, Collingwood (Collingwood Yards)

Tickets:
$7 - Ticket price redeemable as a discount from any book purchases
OR
$69- Entry includes a copy of the book, ready to collect on the night

About the speakers

Paul Loh is the founder and principal designer of LLDS. He is a registered architect in the United Kingdom. His built projects and research have received numerous awards and are widely published. His work has been exhibited at the Science Gallery Melbourne; NGV Triennial, Melbourne; Royal Academy of Arts, London; London Design Festival and Frieze London. His research focuses on the cognitiveengagement of making with digital fabrication and robotics in design practice. Paul is Professor of Architecture and head of the Abedian School of Architecture at Bond University.

David Leggett is the founder and practice leader of LLDS. He is a registered architect in Victoria and the United Kingdom. David studied architecture at the University of East London and the University of Westminster. Prior to establishing LLDS and Power to Make, David was a director at London-based Edward Cullinan Architects (2001–11). His built projects and research have been widely published and exhibited internationally. David’s interest is in material-based research, particularly in architectural detailing, fabrication andassembly.

Donald Bates is Chair of Architectural Design at The University of Melbourne. He is a registered architect in Australia and the UK, a Life Fellow of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects and a Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects. He is the Director of LAB Architecture Studio, whose projects include Melbourne’s award-winning Federation Square.