At a moment in our culture when noise is enormously dense I have chosen an architecture that acts in silence, serenely and without drawing attention to itself. I began my career in México with the restoration of Felix Candela’s work, ‘Los Manantiales’ and wrote my first book at the Academia de España in Rome. Since 1997 my workplace is a small office in front of The Alhambra, Granada.

My ties to the art world began in my childhood and it is thus natural that my work involves interaction with other arts. My mother was a painter and I discovered the world through her intense gaze and palette. I am interested in living space, landscape, sustainability, precision and an economy of expressive resources. I am not interested in styles. I am more interested in books than in magazines, in consistency than in genius, coherency than in artistic composition. And I understand originality as the rediscovery of the true meaning of things.

I am interested in architecture rooted in the earth and in its own time. I accept the determinants of architecture as the rules of a very serious and enjoyable game and I try to play it in a coherent, rigorous way. While it is no longer stylish to speak of serving, I believe that an architect’s work is a quintessential service intended to make people’s lives more agreeable—a noble calling that seeks to make the world more beautiful and more human and to make society fairer. Architecture is no place for the nostalgic, it is a job for rebels.

- Elisa Valero

Stephen Varady is an innovative and respected Australian architect, designer, writer and educator. Born in Sydney, he received a Bachelor of Architecture degree with honours from the University of New South Wales in 1987, and a Masters of Architecture degree from RMIT University in Melbourne in 2002. He is a registered architect in NSW and a member of the Australian Institute of Architects and was appointed Creative Director of 2006 RAIA National Conference.

Stephen has been a lecturer and design teacher since 1985 in architecture and design schools at Sydney University, University of NSW, UTS, Newcastle University and at RMIT University in Melbourne, and has lectured extensively around the world. Stephen is also an architecture critic, writer and photographer, with writings published in Architecture Australia, Monument, ar, inside and the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia, as well as AD and World Architecture in the UK.

Stephen has been principal of Stephen Varady Architecture since 1987.

Between 2008 and 2013 he also worked with Kann Finch, first in the UAE and then in Sydney as Senior Design Architect.

Stephen Varady is a practicing registered architect with over 30 years of experience, and is now also Director of Stephen Varady Associates, a practice for Architecture, Design, Consulting and Special Projects.

Stephen Varady has received a number of awards from the Royal Australian Institute of Architects, the Belle House of the Year Award, a number of Dulux Colour Awards including the 2006 Dulux Colour Award Grand Prix, and 2nd Prize in the NSW Government sponsored Circular Quay Urban Design Ideas Competition.

Stephen’s projects have been published in books and magazines in Australia, the UK, Germany, Hungary, Spain, South Korea, China and the USA. His work has been exhibited in a number of exhibitions including ‘Living the Modern_Australian Architecture’ at the DAZ in Berlin in 2007, and in the ‘Abundant’ exhibition in the Australian Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2008.

Stephen Varady also has success as a competition advisor, registrar and organiser, having prepared and run the Frankston Station Design Competition for the Victorian Government, the Green Square Aquatic Centre Competition and the Green Square Library & Plaza Competition for the City of Sydney, and the Wagga Wagga Civic Centre Competition for Wagga Wagga City Council.