Ivan Rijavec

Ivan Rijavec (born 1951) is an architect living and working in Australia.

Ivan Rijavec was born in Trnovo, Slovenia in 1951. At age 1 his family moved to the small coastal town of Albany, Western Australia.

Rijavec attributes his earliest architectural influence to the Italian structural engineer and architect Pier Luigi Nervi’s innovative work in concrete. He cites the spatial quality of Palazzo Dello Sport’s dome as having ignited his architectural interests when in 1968 he stumbled on a faded small black and white photograph of it in an engineering volume extolling the virtues of pre-cast concrete.

In 1969 Rijavec enrolled in architecture at Curtin University, Western Australia. Whilst completing the first tier of the course, he won a bursary postponing his degree to undertake a study tour of Europe tracing the development of Western Civilisation through Greece, central and Western Europe. He remained in Europe for six years travelling, studying and working predominantly in London and Umeå, Sweden.

In 1977 Rijavec returned to Australia completing his bachelors and master's degrees at RMIT in 1979 and 1992. After a period working at Bates Smart, he was appointed associate director in 1985 and subsequent to his design role on the Coronial Services Centre was headhunted as a design leader at the Victorian Public Works Department. There he worked on a government initiative to raise Victorian design standards in the Justice and Tafe Groups before devoting himself exclusively to his own practice in 1988.

From the late 1980s till present, Rijavec Architects have had a prodigious output, receiving 10 professional awards and numerous other commendations for outstanding architecture. Over the same period Rijavec taught at the RMIT University of Technology Department of Architecture and served on numerous professional advisory panels, competition and design juries. His architecture employs unique curvilinear geometries in the creation of forms and spaces that have been described as sculptural, intensely intimate and poetic. As the scale and breadth of his projects increased, his focus broadened to include Australian urbanism. Rijavec was included in Melbourne Masters Architecture exhibition held in November 2004 TarraWarra Museum of Art | Exhibitions that exhibited the works of some of Melbourne’s most celebrated architects.

...
Wikipedia