Rush Wright Associates is an award-winning design practice based in Melbourne, Australia, offering consultancy services in landscape architecture, urban design and constructed ecology.
We have completed over 670 projects. Bringing together the extensive experience and design expertise of its two founding directors, Catherine Rush and Michael Wright, the company has built its reputation on its commitment to achieving innovative and diverse design outcomes.
The strength and philosophy of Rush Wright Associates is in the overall unique combination of services, focused on marrying client expectations with the best possible design solutions and environmental principles. We have a demonstrated track record in designing landscapes and urban design proposals that go beyond superficial formal gestures to embrace sustainability, community values and the new environmental agenda.
We have extensive experience working with private and public sector client authorities, as well as Federal, State, and Local Government bodies in the design evolution and delivery of landscape and urban design projects at the complete range of scales.
Our work internationally includes collaborations with offices in the United States, the United Kingdom, in Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates.
We invent new forms, crafted from new ideas. Our designs explore uniqueness, derived from our own insight and exploration into place, people, culture, materials, details and systems of construction. The Earth Sciences Garden at Monash University Australia is the first of its kind anywhere, and was created to showcase key features of the geology and geomorphology of Victoria establishing an outdoor teaching laboratory for the study of Earth Sciences. The Shrine of Remembrance demonstrates a distinctive contemporary approach that eschews superficial formality to create a new type of immersive symbolic landscape that explores service, sacrifice and commemoration.
Our design process is first and foremost an iterative process and requires a special attitude to place making, design thinking and collaboration. It is a feedback loop that includes the client, stakeholders and end user’s assessment and input through all stages of design – from the very early stages through to the nitty gritty of resolution to enhance, hone and improve the project outcomes in relation to their needs, wants and aspirations. Springvale Community Hub is a testament to our ability to embed local cultural diversity into a new civic proposition that has been locally embraced and nationally recognised.
The beauty of living systems is our constant inspiration and our guide. Our project experience demonstrates our many different approaches to environmental leadership and sustainability from careful water management, treatment and harvesting; wetland design; plant selection for biodiversity, habitat values and resilience in the face of a changing climate; and selection of materials based on total life cycle energy use. We believe healthy environments contribute to community well-being and our botanically rich design at the Victorian Comprehensive Cancer Centre serves as a reminder of the life-giving benefits of nature.
Rush Wright Associates, in conjunction with our in-house company Scenery, have developed unique skills in visualisation of city scenes and landscapes.
“Landscape is really the stuff of life itself, the great theatre of the living spirit, the basis of collective endeavour, the territory of public space, the ecology of new world environments. This is the foundation of our technique and the reality of landscape architecture.”
– Catherine Rush and Michael Wright
