Edmund Capon, the former director of the Art Gallery of NSW who is now chair of the Australian Institute of Architects Foundation, is hoping to create a debate in Australia about architecture as art.

“Maybe we have perhaps not paid quite enough attention to the subjective elements of development, and I say I’m sitting here and overlooking an absolute, manic concentration of intensely functional buildings,” he told The Australian. “You’ve only got to look around here to see what has driven a lot of architecture is the economics of development and I think, as we’ve seen Australian cities grow we see this kind of manic urgency about build, build, build. When you think about architecture we think about development, property and value and we think about money, but the fact is that buildings are also objects of design.”