Katherine Ashe

Katherine Ashe has been teaching, practicing, and studying architecture in Western Australia since 1996, and her work engages with varying approaches to architectural design. She seeks to explore creative diversity through relationships with different institutions, practice/creative partnerships, research and education.

Katherine is a co-founder of Vittino Ashe architects in Boorloo/Perth and a senior lecturer and co-chair of the architectural design stream at the University of Notre Dame in Walyalup/Fremantle. She is currently undertaking a reflective, practice-based PhD through RMIT, which uses case studies, differing creative modes of working, and speculative projects to explore the processes that embed architecture into its situation. These innate generative tendencies emerge from a practice manner, studio teaching approach, and personal creative life – one that attempts to connect people to place and to one another.

Influenced by her childhood in the remote desert regions of Australia, Katherine is particularly interested in working to develop project-specific ways of weaving Traditional and Western knowledge systems into her practices. Katherine aims to connect these differing realms directly, and this interplay informs her design studios, which focus on building individual capability to inform meaningful architectural propositions.

Her architectural practice, Vittino Ashe, is a small studio committed to a process-driven architecture. Projects are undertaken on varying scales and types, from strategic visioning to small, highly crafted works. Katherine is a registered architect and in 2018 received the Western Australian chapter of the Australian Institute of Architects' Emerging Architects Prize, recognizing her ongoing contribution to practice, education and research.