About Marcus: a Writer who designs buildings

Marcus Baumgart is a writer who designs buildings. He practices creativity at the nexus of a lot of contradictory and disparate creative activities. There is a noble tradition of this, to quote Walt Whitman:

“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

Marcus is a sociable introvert who loves writing in cafés, and has been doing so in Melbourne and elsewhere in the world for a good many years. While in his favourite haunts, he has been known to write prose fiction, poetry and critical reviews of architecture, design and art. The latter have been published in various journals, including Artichoke magazine, The Journal of the Design Institute of Australia, Architecture Australia, Monument, Landscape Architecture Australia and Houses Magazine. For a repository of Marcus’ published reviews, essays and articles, look here at Architectureau.com.

If you wish to know more, you can visit The Terminal, which is the launching site of a suite of different and loosely connected initiatives, projects and places.

The Fiction

Marcus is currently working on a range of projects include a work of fiction that explores artificial intelligence and its relationship to stories and storytelling. Gods, monsters, machines, human beings and strange bird-headed bipedal creatures are all in there. Check out his still-modest but slowly growing fiction archive at unfiction.org to begin reading the Bedtime Stories for Emerging Artificial Intelligences.

The Day Job

Since graduation from an architecture degree programme with Honours in 1998 Marcus has practised in architecture and urban design, lectured in cultural studies and film studies, and taught design at RMIT and the University of Melbourne. Marcus also runs his own architecture studio in Melbourne with redoubtable business partner John A. Clark, focusing on housing the needful and homeless, housing the moderately wealthy and the elderly, multiple residential buildings, social and affordable housing, school and university buildings, and strategic thinking and master planning relating to property. You can visit their architecture website here.

What Marcus Supports

A Member of the Long Now Foundation and Writers Victoria, Marcus also supports the work of the UNHCR, Reporters Sans Frontiére, Sacred Heart Mission and the Australian Cerebral Palsy Alliance. 

Marcus’ Household Familiars