Claire Martin

Design Leadership / Advocate / Mentor / Associate Director, OCULUS / AILA FRLA

Greater Melbourne Area

About

Claire Martin is an award-winning landscape architect and Associate Director at OCULUS, known for her systems approach across a range of scales from insect hotels to public spaces, up to statewide greening strategies. With a career spanning two decades, Claire has curated projects across Australia and internationally, focusing on material thinking, and landscape performance, creating places that support connection and resilience. A Fellow and past National President of the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects, she is a sought-after speaker and design advocate. Passionate about mentoring, Claire invites the next generation of designers to reimagine their role, in improving our everyday.

Experience

  • OCULUS (20 yrs 6 mos)
    • Associate Director
      2016 - Present · 10 yrs 6 mos

    • Senior Associate
      2012 - 2016 · 4 yrs

    • Associate
      2010 - 2012 · 2 yrs

  • Architecture Media (19 yrs 8 mos)
    • Contributing Editor / Freelance Writer
      Nov 2006 - Present · 19 yrs 8 mos

    • Co-Editor Landscape Architecture Australia Issue 151
      Jan 2016 - Jun 2016 · 6 mos

      In this issue of Landscape Architecture Australia entitled “The Moving City,” we explore our embodied capacity to dwell and be moved, the diminishing of meaning and the loss of quiet, perception and impermanence, exchange and dissonance, fluidity and flux, and traces of memory in a re-situated city. This issue is about life and serves as a reminder that we have the capacity to turn thought into action. Through the lenses of Microcosm, Mesocosm and Macrocosm we explore the elusive moving city.

  • RMIT University (18 yrs 5 mos)
    • Member (Chair 2012-2014) Landscape Architecture Industry Advisory Committee
      Feb 2010 - Present · 16 yrs 5 mos

    • Critic / Sessional Lecturer, School of Architecture & Design
      Feb 2008 - Present · 18 yrs 5 mos

    • Co-ordinator, Landscape Professional Practice
      Jul 2018 - Oct 2018 · 4 mos

  • Panellist, Victorian Design Review at Office of the Victorian Government Architect (OVGA)
    Sep 2016 - Jun 2025 · 8 yrs 10 mos

  • Member, Climate Adaptation/Mitigation Expert Reference Group at University of Melbourne
    Nov 2020 - Nov 2023 · 3 yrs 1 mo

    Research into ‘Integrating climate change adaptation and mitigation across Australia’s built environment’ Australian Research Council Grant DP200101378. This 3 year project (2020-2022), funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery grant, to facilitate the integration of climate change adaptation and mitigation across Australia’s built environment sectors: design, urban planning, construction and property. Cities are significant contributors to climate change, but actions are presently limited, and unintegrated across sectors. The project expects to generate new knowledge to advance climate change action. An expected outcome is a framework to guide decision making in the built environment. Through communication to practitioners and policy makers, this project plans to provide significant benefit for Australian cities and society: progressing climate change action, informing investment decisions, and reducing the harm and cost predicted from climate change.