It was a refreshing change to go and see Micheal C Place {Build} talk at the Powerhouse Museum last Thursday. Place was in Australia as a guest of Refill magazine to help launch issue four of their magazine. After a steady diet of architecture related talks, I realise now that I attend these things with a heavy dose of cynicism pre attached. I generally know what I am going to get when going to an architecture talk; Glenn or Harry rallying the troops to take up arms against local councils, Chris Johnson spruiking his new book and placing himself in a lineage that includes Francis Greenway and Walter Liberty Vernon, some young firm reinventing the lean-to and so on. I have baggage in this department.

In comparison I know next to nothing about graphic design; its professional bickering, its cliques, whether I should prefer vectors over pixels, if digital printing onto canvass is taboo, if deleuze’s fold has infiltrated their university courses, whatever. It pretty much all impresses me. As such I sat there for the duration of the talk, in awe of the talent on display.

Refill Issue four in its bag > the magazine and some of the other stuff in the bag > Build poster

Obviously more comfortable in front of a screen than talking in front of an audience, to start Place was nervous to the point of distraction. Constant scratching and the occasional asthma puffer puff punctuated the opening ten, fifteen minutes of the talk where he ran through his life story - son of a pig farmer, drawing spaceships as a kid, studying graphic design, early jobs and finally his ten {nine?} year stint at Designers Republic where he hit his stride and developed his trademark style.

When he began talking about setting up his own firm, Build, and the work that he has been producing under that banner, he eased up, the scratching became less frequent and he fell into his stride. This work is relentlessly creative, methodical and obsessive. The potentials of printed matter are explored through the use of different types of inks and stock. In particular one project for a Japanese design journal stuck out where a series of removable vinyl overlays were each printed with a different design and using different inks. When overlaid each other in different arrangements various other designs are revealed.

He is an obviously obsessive designer and like the instruction booklets that he is a keen collector of, each work is packed with a huge amount of data from the dimensions of the artwork, the inks used, the size of the digital file, the date it was created, the symptoms of asthma, the corresponding position of CD tracks on a CD cover, to instructions on where to fold and where to cut. In the three page Asthma and Eczema series, again for a Japanese design journal {and also explaining the incessant scratching}, ventolin puffers are dissected and examined, asthma symptoms spelt out, a tree becomes a lung and thirty minutes worth of scratching is recorded and mapped.

Approached from the position of architecture, perhaps the most compelling aspect of Build’s work is manner in which scale is explored. Form and type are applied at macro and micro level with equal weighting creating compositions that are equally complex on multiple levels. Unable to resist continuing the comparison to architecture it can be likened to the layering of scale in the work of Carlo Scarpa where the detail cannot be discerned from the whole. The result is a kind of self referential, self contained object that operates at many scales.