In other work, such as Garangula Gallery in New South Wales, owned by a Swiss currency trader, it was less organic and more about taking a specific brief — in this case, the simple direction of “100 artworks, 100 people for dinner”. The idea with Garangula was to carefully display 100 works of Indigenous art but also make the place a sort of banquet hall for the owner when he holds grand dinners. “So the Indigenous art is contained within chambers, almost like caves,” Fender explains, doing a sketch. “But it was designed so that the walls could turn and make this big space down the middle, like a baronial hall.” The walls pivot and the art moves from being contained in intimate, calm spaces, to face out to the 100 guests. As well, collaborator Mirams worked with artist Jonathan Jones of the local Wiradjuri people to shape some of the external architectural content of the building — animating a water feature near the sculpture courtyard, a corten steel screen and a rammed earth facade.

Likewise, the Bendigo Art Gallery comes to life as Fender illustrates the extraordinary and long-term organic development of the site, beginning with $4.9m of additions over three separate incursions, plus the most recent creation of a new gallery and storage site finished in 2014, with more possibly to come. Beginning with working on three heritage spaces and a site next door occupied by a 1960s motel, the site now has a well-known glassed-in sculpture gallery at the rear, an inviting gateway at the front, and a new exhibition space at the rear that has a central cube-shaped interior that is slightly pivoted to form interesting spaces around it. “Part of the charm of Bendigo Gallery is that it was organic, it just grew and grew,” Fender says. He’s not surprised visitor numbers have skyrocketed since the first addition, under director Tony Ellwood in 1997, to Karen Quinlan’s continuing long-term reign.