Thirty years ago, I was a young architect at Rudder Littlemore and Rudder, working on a design and construct project with Leighton Holdings at Hawkesbury Agricultural College.

Three buildings. Lecture theatres, offices, science labs. The first stage of what would later become the University of Western Sydney.

I was the project architect, working alongside one of the directors. It was the kind of brief that teaches you everything quickly. Real budget. Real deadlines. Real consequences if you got the detailing wrong.

I was back in Richmond recently for another project, and I made a detour to walk through the campus. I wanted to see how the buildings had aged.

They were still there. Still in use. Still doing exactly what we designed them to do.

And the thing that struck me wasn’t sentimentality. It was the materials.

Three decades on, the choices we made about what to build with were quietly doing their job. Brickwork still crisp. Steel still sound. Surfaces still standing up to thousands of students cycling through every year. Almost no visible wear. Almost no signs of intervention.

That doesn’t happen by accident.

When you specify materials, you’re not just choosing what a building will look like on opening day. You’re choosing how it will behave in twenty years. Whether the budget will be eaten by repairs and repaints. Whether the building will still feel dignified when the original architect is long gone.

The buildings I designed at Hawkesbury weren’t flashy. They weren’t trying to be. They were honest, well-detailed, and built to last. That was the brief I gave myself, even when no one asked me to.

Walking through them again, I felt something I didn’t expect. Not pride exactly. More like quiet relief. The decisions I made as a young architect, with less experience and less confidence than I have now, still hold up.

That’s the thing about architecture. The work outlives the architect. The materials you choose are a promise to people you’ll never meet. The students sitting in those lecture theatres today weren’t born when I drew those plans.

It’s the part of this job I think about more as I get older. Not the awards. Not the openings. The thirty-year walk-through, when no one’s watching, and the building is still doing its job.