Tim Shannon

Of triangles and points

20/3/2026

The Cowes Jetty Triangle is a “she’ll be right triangle” for good reason.

By Tim Shannon

IT IS a long time since I first heard the name The Jetty Triangle and tried to see how it described the rather odd place that joins the Cowes foreshore to its tired jetty. I recall a sloping patch of unkempt bitumen which was a mixture of road, car park, foot path, and the spot for the occasional open-air market with stalls that leaned this way and that. It had no regular shape, but perhaps the space bordered by an assortment of walls, bollards, and a War Memorial was more like a triangle than anything else, a sort of a “she’ll be right mate” triangle.

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Finding my island

3/3/2026

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This is an extract from 'An Architect's Story', by Tim Shannon, based on
a series of essays that first appeared in the Bass Coast Post.

By Tim Shannon

WHILE swimming, art and photography have provided solace and inspiration in this architectural life, it has been a relationship with Phillip Island that has provided balance. Not far from Melbourne, the island sits in the mouth of Western Port Bay.

Its coastline is complex and varied, and while one half faces Bass Strait, the other faces north across the bay and to the Mornington Peninsula across the Western Arm where the bay meets the Strait. Its northern beaches are strung along a beautiful foreshore; sandy coves and open beaches occasionally strewn with seaweed, separated along its length by tidal reefs and rock pools. The air is clear and smells of the ocean mixed with tidal shores, bursting with goodness, it carries the sights and sounds of a wonderful mix of birds from the land and the sea. Its southern coast looks out from basalt and granite cliffs into Bass Strait with its blustery winds and moody seas, and the land between is mostly rolling farmland fields.

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A welcome for Berninneit

13/5/2024

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Berninneit: a fitting portrait of the Phillip Island community. Photo: Peter Clarke

By Tim Shannon

HELLO Berninneit, I have come with open arms to welcome you, to wander about you and take you into my gaze as I learn what you have to say. Like a portrait you are the artistic result of a strange process where a benefactor asks for an image of someone dear and the result endures the lasting and unpredictable attention of a public audience; you have no voice but your presence speaks for itself now and long into the future.

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Flights of fancy

26/1/2023

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Ross and Keith Smith’s Vickers Vimy at Adelaide Airport is a throwback to an era when airports celebrated the wonder of flight rather than being shopping malls.

By Tim Shannon

I HAVE a memory, or perhaps it is a memory of a memory when I was three, flying with my mother from Melbourne to Adelaide on a cold night in a noisy plane that had two big propellors. We were joining my father to board a ship sailing from Outer Harbour, bound for England. He was a young aeronautical engineer who had spent three years working at the Government Aircraft Factory at Fisherman’s Bend in Melbourne, and now he was off to England for two years of research at Farnborough Airport. My recollections of the slow six-week voyage are unreliable, except for looking through the cabin porthole at the lights of boats flickering across the water.

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The Australian court house

29/5/2022

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Wonthaggi court house, one of the grander buildings in town. If you have to spend time in a
court house, pay attention to the architecture, suggests Tim Shannon

By Tim Shannon

MOST of us prefer to avoid court houses. However, there are people who spend their working lives serving the Court, doing their best to steer the carriage of justice, to uphold the law, and to protect our rights. The courts are the highest authorities in the land, they quietly keep governments and citizens in tow, and the buildings they reside in are most curious.

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In search of delight

18/5/2022

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Essays on encounters with Firmness and Commodity, by Tim Shannon, with thanks to Vitruvius

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A house of dreams

7/10/2021

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Tim Shannon dreams of a beautifully crafted house with
stories of its own to tell. Collage by Jill Shannon

By Tim Shannon

HOUSES are great story tellers, they reveal a lot about their inhabitants. Often life’s circumstances affect where and how we live in our houses, but the tussle between how we are shaped by where we live, and how we influence this shaping to our liking is where the stories grow. House making is such an important part of life, if we were given the freedom to forage through our dreams and imagine a house that told our stories, what Utopias might we discover?

I don’t like being isolated, or crowded. I am comfortable when I stand on a rise, facing north with dawn to my right and dusk to my left, under a big sky with the horizon in the distance. Perhaps this is because I grew up in Colonel Light’s Garden City, which was surveyed with a keen eye on a foreign landscape under a summer sun and clear skies 185 years ago.

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Quiet times

29/7/2021

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Somewhere between necessity and beauty,
the making of things is a gift in itself

By Tim Shannon

IN MY bedroom above a chest of drawers hangs a small black and white photograph that was taken by my father. It shows my mother holding my four year old hand on a wintery day outside a gate of Windsor Castle. She is wearing a long woollen coat that I can recall nestling into, and her face is happy. Occasionally I pause to look at it, usually in the quiet of early morning, and my thoughts turn to childhood memories.

Like all houses, ours has an eclectic variety of objects that we keep. Some are made by strangers, some are rocks, bones, and shells found while walking, some are made by the family, some are gifts from friends, some are paintings, some are photographs, some are pieces of furniture, some are clothes, some are children’s toys, some we can’t find but we are sure they are there somewhere. Given enough quiet time, each of them has a story to tell.

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A letter to Tim’s iPhone

14/9/2020

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SEPTEMBER 2020.

Dear Tim’s iPhone,

Strange times indeed to find myself writing to you, my mobile mate, my phablet friend. I can’t say why, but for a while I have been wanting to write you a letter.

Your memory is better than mine, but I can recall when a phone was a telephone. It was a logical device with cables to help voices reach their intended destination. It had a listening piece and a talking piece to avoid mistakes while guessing where you should place your ear or your mouth. It needed three pennies to make it work when its buttons A and B were pressed as directed. It was located inside a box of red painted timber frames holding panes of shining glass. Also inside this box was a worn directory full of names and numbers, and a musty smell unique to those wonderful places where telephone conversations were private, yet public performances.

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Self portrait of an architect

19/3/2020

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Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, drawn in about 1490, is believed to be
a self-portrait. In an accompanying note da Vinci wrote: “The proportions
of the human body according to [Roman architect] Vitruvius”.

For Jill

By Tim Shannon

I AM host to the mind of an architect. For nearly seventy years I have listened to its voice and experienced its thoughts and emotions; together we have accumulated a vast library of images and explored a myriad of places in our dreams. Despite my trying, I cannot be anyone other than me, and I cannot be any other architect than the one I am. All the while my path has been the servant of chance and hope, being occasionally guided by a kindly soul.

At first I did not know what it was to be an architect, or what architecture might be. My mind was a pure blank page, unspoiled, anticipating. The first wisps to enter this void were revered but vague opinions claiming that architecture was “firmness, commodity and delight”, “frozen music”, “the magnificent play of light on volumes in space”, or “the greatest of the arts”. Like the ancient guilds, architecture for the uninitiated was discussed in codes, admission was guarded, and its prestige lay in its mystique.

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