Bates Smart, one of Australia’s longest continuously running practices, adores the material. The word means ‘baked’ or ‘cooked’, which he found poetically apt for a place and a country. It is ancient, from the Babylonians’ Ishtar Gate to the Terracotta Warriors, and that endurance is the point: the most sustainable materials, he argued, are the most enduring ones, and there is nothing quite like a 2,000-year-old testimonial.

Made today, terracotta offers real mass customisation, a wide range of profiles, shapes and finishes, which he showed from a factory visit in China for a Queensland project, while keeping its virtues: recyclable, non-combustible, low-carbon, natural and endlessly adaptable in scale and form. And it already shapes Melbourne, often unnoticed: the faience of Harry Norris’s 1930s McPherson’s building, the roughly 250 tonnes on the Gothic Manchester Unity, and 299 Bourke Street, another Norris building, its rose-mauve glazed terracotta now wrapping the Mecca store after a Bates Smart base-build renovation.

The studio’s own recent work runs across three projects. The Gandel Wing, completed in 2019, uses terracotta as a diaphanous screen, its colour in dialogue with the masonry hospital beside it, screening a residential neighbourhood while casting a dappled light inside.

In Sydney the same year, the Boomerang Tower at Olympic Park pleats terracotta battens across its podium, a delicate handling of the material over car parking and office floors, while its 2015 precursor, the engineering school at UNSW, drew its tile colours straight from the brickwork of the existing Ainsworth building it extends.

The thread across all of them, Hermijanto suggested, is that terracotta brings warmth and craft back into the city: an old material, reinvented, that ages into an asset rather than a liability.