Jan in the studio in front of Peter Robertson’s painting of the site of the Empire State building prior to construction.
Jan van Schaik is an artist and architect based in Melbourne. He is the director of MvS Architects, a researcher and PhD supervisor at RMIT Architecture & Urban Design, the founder and convener of the +Concepts creative practice presentation and performance series, the designer of the Lost Tablets art project, and founder and creative sector consultant at Future Tense.
Making art about architecture, and vice versa, Jan is engaged in the governance and communities of both. And lives amongst a dense salon hang of works by family, heroes, and peers.
He has two decades of experience designing award winning prototypical public and residential buildings, leading innovative research projects, and supporting contemporary arts organisations through patronage and governance.
Arising from an interest in the complex relationship between human beings and their environments, Jan’s work focuses on the cultural and societal underpinnings of architecture.
His designs of public buildings; mixed-use hubs; strategic plans; feasibility studies; master-plans; secondary and tertiary education projects; adaptive reuse projects; exhibitions in major art galleries; buildings in sensitive ecological environments; and prototypical residential projects have received numerous awards, and been published Australia wide and internationally.
He provides strategic advice, research, and communications services to chart creative and cultural ecologies, and to support them to thrive.
His work creates conditions and environments that encourage and celebrate creative exertion and experimentation – and the cultural, social and economic dividends that these exertions and experiments generate.
In 2018, he instigated Creative Ecologies, an Australia-wide initiative to build thriving creative communities and develop tools to foster their growth.
As a creative industries strategist and researcher at Future Tense he brings clarity to complex situations and develops actionable recommendations for governments and organisations to seize the opportunities available to them.
As a PhD supervisor he guides established architects, and artists, to uncover original contributions to knowledge latent in their own work — which in turn supercharges their own practices and contributes to a global body of valued creative practice knowledge.
Jan is the designer of Lost Tablets, a series of works which explore the mysteries of human existence by exploiting a tension between a universally recognisable children’s toy and the grammar of architectural symbols.
The works have received honourable mentions for art and architecture awards and featured in the inaugural Quarantine Art Fair in January, and Melbourne Design Week, and have been on display in the virtual Italian Pavilion of the Venice Biennale of Architecture since 2021.
Lost Tablets are listed on Artsy with Alfa Gallery in Miami.
Jan is the convener of +Concepts, a presentation and performance series exploring the insights practitioners have into their own creative and cultural practices.
Founded in 2016, it has hosted over 120 events featuring Australian and international practitioners of performance, music, art, and architecture.
Registered Architect in Victoria. BArch. PhD. AIA. ARBV 18658