Talking Architecture & Design

In our first Shortcast in over two years, we talk with Will Messiter, Chief Operating Officer - Residential Communities and Home Building at Sekisui House Australia, at the company's manufacturing and assembly facility in southwest Sydney, about house building, the bottlenecks in Australia's building market, and how prefab and modular can offer a solution to our house affordability woes.

As operational energy efficiency improves, attention is increasingly turning to embodied carbon—the emissions associated with extracting raw materials, manufacturing products, transporting them, installing them, and, ultimately, dealing with them at the end of their useful life. 
That puts materials and material innovation firmly at the centre of the conversation. 
Jonathan Mountfort, Creative Director at Autex Acoustics, has more than two decades of experience across design and manufacturing, with a career spanning mechanical engineering, product design, materials innovation, and acoustics. 
At Autex, he leads a team across design and engineering and has contributed to recycling technologies, product development, and the company's broader sustainability journey. 
In this episode, Jonathan shares a particularly interesting perspective from the intersection of product design, manufacturing, and architecture—three areas that increasingly need to work together if we're going to reduce the built environment's carbon impact. 
This podcast is brought to you in association with Autex Acoustics, proud sponsors of our 2026 Sustainability series of podcasts.

Tara Veldman, Managing Director and Principal at Billard Leece Partnership, has played a major role in growing BLP’s health architecture practice and has worked across hospitals, health hubs, research facilities, education precincts, and other complex environments. 
In 2025, Tara was named the inaugural recipient of the Australian Health Design Council Gold Medal, recognising her leadership and contribution to healthcare design in Australia and internationally. 
Her approach is particularly interesting because it goes beyond simply designing healthcare buildings. 
She’s a strong advocate for evidence-based, user-focused design and for thinking about how architecture can influence how people feel, heal, and connect.

Kevin Hogan, Head of Design & Digital Engineering at Kapitol Group leads an in-house team of more than 20 digital engineers, design managers and architects, driving Virtual Design and Construction (VDC), Building Information Modelling (BIM), and the development of custom digital tools including Kapitol’s 3D Construction Tracker. 
He’s also become a leading voice across Australia’s construction sector, advocating for the practical use of BIM and artificial intelligence to reduce waste, improve productivity and fundamentally change how buildings are delivered. 
Kapitol now models every project before construction begins, helping eliminate costly clashes, reduce rework and improve project certainty.

We talk with BVN CEOS & principals, Ali Bounds, Principal & Co-CEO (Sydney) and Neil Logan, Principal & Co-CEO (Brisbane) about the signifance of BVN reaching its' 100th birthday.
In August 1926, Arthur Bligh, BVNs founding principal, set in motion a trajectory of architectural endeavour defined by curiosity, reinvention and collective effort that has endured for 100 years. 
Through recession, war, boom times, low times and a new millennium, 44 principals have passed on the baton of shared partnership and authorship, bolstered by thousands of alums, countless collaborators, clients, supporters and friends, united by a shared purpose to design a better future.

So, a century later, BVN's journey is now all about looking to the future with optimism and gratitude for those who have persevered, fostering the belief that architecture matters to society and pursuing that with integrity, creativity and care.