Katherine Ashe has been teaching, practising, and studying architecture in Western Australia since 1996. Her work explores a range of approaches to architectural design and seeks creative diversity through relationships with different institutions, industry, research, and studio education. These innate connective tendencies emerge as a symbiotic studio-teaching approach and experimental practice.
Katherine is a co-founder of Vittino Ashe architects in Boorloo/Perth and a senior lecturer/co-chair of the architectural design stream at the University of Notre Dame in Walyalup/Fremantle. Currently undertaking a design practice-based PhD at RMIT, she is using case studies, diverse modes of working, and speculative projects to explore processes that embed architecture in its situation. Influenced by her childhood in the remote desert regions of Australia, Katherine is particularly interested in developing a project-specific capacity to foreground deeply felt knowledge – Traditional and Western – to integrate into her creative works.
Vittino Ashe, co-directed with Marco Vittino, is a small studio committed to a process-driven, collaborative architectural production. Projects are of varying scales and types, from strategic visioning to small, highly crafted interiors, where resonant traces, people, places and stories all begin to coalesce. Katherine is a registered architect and in 2018 received the Western Australian Institute of Architects’ Emerging Architects Prize, recognising her ongoing contribution to practice, education and research.
