Architecture Interacting
Brit Andresen and Peter O’Gorman
An important step in the architectural design process is the synthesis of what
appear to be incompatible intentions: the poetic as well as the pragmatic.
The search in architecture is for design solutions that engage and sustain the
simultaneous balance of these apparently dissimilar intentions. In the process,
the architecture becomes layered with interrelated ideas, and – as with peeling
an onion – can be discovered anew in the building, layer by layer.
Although the projects we present may be used to describe a particular
intention, they are usually of this nature, layer on layer, and often serve to
describe additional or related ideas.
Architecture is bound to the fascinating interplay between factors of
production (construction, materials, etc), of environment (place, landscape, etc)
and of culture (history, community, etc). Inevitably these are discussed
as separately identifiable components. At times in the history of architectural
design, each becomes a preoccupation in a theory or design goal.
Interaction between any two of these factors demonstrates how the variables
of the one modify dramatically the apparent design goals of the other
and initiate the possible synthesis of a new condition – a result not necessarily
predicted by the two. An architectural intention engaged with all three factors
simultaneously expands the synthetic possibilities.
As Colin St John Wilson suggests, the imagination is the bridge in the
synthetic process, seeking out conceptual solutions and binding the apparently
incompatible factors into new entities.1 This process inevitably requires
insight, metaphor and what is loosely called an ‘idea’. This phenomenon of
transformation has intrigued human endeavour since prehistory and is
at the crux of art and technology as well as architecture.
It is such a simple observation, but true, that buildings are rarely seen
or heard or felt in an instance. They are experienced over a time, and this both
gives them one of their unique characteristics and offers a source of pleasure.
Our goal is an interacting architecture where the building becomes an agent in
those experiences rather than a passive container of various functions.
We are often asked whether we consider architecture to be an art and how it
differs from, for example, painting or sculpture. We share Colin St John Wilson’s
understanding that architecture is a practical art involving a ‘purposeful
inhabitation of space’2 and contributing to the enhancement of everyday
experience. This primary social role necessarily places the inhabitant, acts of
12
1 Colin St John Wilson: 3 Writer David use and human spatial experience at the centre of our architectural concern.
Architectural Malouf’s evocative
Reflections, descriptions of the We believe that the proposition of an architecture founded on the idea
Butterworth Brisbane landscape of interaction, linked to relationship and experience, offers potential for greater
Heinemann, Oxford, and its wooden houses
1992, p18 recall the unique coherence between place and occasion. This idea can avoid the reductive
2 Ibid, p24 qualities of the place sameness characteristic of so much contemporary architecture. Architecture
in which we live
and work. becomes more closely connected to life when those relationships are based in
David Malouf: the fuller spectrum of the human imagination.
‘A First Place: The
Mapping of a World’, As a setting for our architectural projects, we include the following reflections
Johnno, Short Stories,
Poems, Essays
based on a selection of notes from our lectures, research and study tours.
1 ‘Sunlit Interior’, Vida Lahey, 1932
and Interviews, (reproduced by kind permission
ed James Tulip, UQ
Press, 1990
Place of Shirley Lahey)
While architecture differs from the other arts, particularly in serving the
everyday needs of dwelling, works by painters and writers often reveal
the poetics of places we inhabit. Works by Australian painters such as Vida
Lahey, (Fig 1) Ian Smith (Fig 2) and William Robinson reveal light and fractured
shadows along the edge of the subtropical house; the way we body-sense
directions in landscapes; and the intimacy of inhabiting a wild place that might
also be paradise.
William Robinson’s paintings from the hills and gullies of Beechmont
present surprising landscapes. Wayward trees describe the spatial ambiguity
of a shifting ground plane, and the sky appears in the depths of the earth 2 ‘Many Hometown Houses Are on High Stumps’,
on the surface of a waterhole. This emphasis on the apparent relations between Ian Smith, 1984 (reproduced by kind permission
of the artist)
elements, rather than precise measurement and perspective, vividly records
the experience of the landscape and enlivens the memory of it. (Fig 3)
Poet David Malouf describes Brisbane as a city of hills: ‘all gullies and
suburban vistas’, a place that might provoke ‘drama and a kind of intellectual
play that delights in new and shifting views’. Describing Brisbane and the
timber house of his childhood, Malouf goes on to wonder ‘how the elements
of a place and our inner lives cross and illuminate one another, how
we interpret space, and in so doing make our first maps of reality, how we
mythologise spaces and through that mythology (a good deal of it inherited)
find our way into a culture’.3
3 ‘Creation Landscape – Man and the Spheres I’,
Both painter and poet work from acute observations of particular places, William Robinson (NGA, Victoria)
offering observations infused with perceptions about spatial qualities that can
revitalise more general abstract ideas in architecture.
13

4 Queenslander wooden house, Brisbane
5 Threshold verandah
between inside and outside,
in a Queenslander house,
Chelmer, Brisbane
14
While perceptions of space inform the artists’ work, the task of making
habitable space rests with architects. Architectural space includes the realms
of primal space, social space and the space within a particular place and its
layers of meaning.
Experiencing place
Malouf’s topo-analysis of Brisbane’s landscape and its traditional wooden
houses recalls the experiential qualities of the place in which we live and work.
In describing Brisbane’s inhabited terrain, the spatial directions of up
and down, inside and outside are invoked, locating the body in the landscape
and within the wooden house. (Fig 4)
The traditional wooden house reveals a range of spatial qualities, from those
of its interior core of rooms outward to the exposed verandah edge, and from
below among dark stumps to the raised platform above. The landscape itself
is discovered through sensual experiences, in the way that the hilly topography
is learned and recalled through exertions of the body and breath.
Malouf reveals the poetics of space in the wooden house in describing
interactive experiences and in drawing the imagination to places where
memories can readily take hold. Malouf’s wooden house is first discovered in
childhood by feeling floorboards, licking paint flakes, listening to the frame
creaking and then through a range of sensual interactions that eventually
create a place-intimacy based on these earliest experiences. What Malouf seeks
out and reveals is an understanding of ‘how the elements of a place and our
inner lives cross and illuminate one another, how we interpret space, and in so
doing make our first maps of reality’.4
Others have speculated from studies in the field of infant psychology that
spatial experiences start at birth. Adrian Stokes refers to Melanie Klein’s
proposition that the primary human experience of a sheltering interior space
is followed by the newborn infant’s shock of detachment and exposure to the
exterior. This first experience by the body of the opposing states of containment
within and exposure without is universal and ‘charged with emotional drama’.5
St John Wilson draws our attention to the phenomenon that, at any
time, ‘We are inside or outside; or on the threshold between. (Fig 5) There are
no other places to be’.6 These three places, connected in various ways, make
up the field of spatial relationships around us that our bodies and psyches are
sensitive to. ‘What is surprising’, writes St John Wilson, ‘is that it is a realm
of perception without common recognition – and this lack of acknowledgement
is the more remarkable in view of the extent to which in actuality it pervades
our day to day experience.’7
Awareness that a place and its qualities are experienced in mundane use and
through the senses also offers opportunities in architecture for creating
4 Ibid, p261 8 In conversation poetic interpretations of pragmatic determinants. Sensitivity to subconscious
5 Colin St John Wilson: with Aldo van Eyck,
op cit, p6 Amsterdam, 1992 experience, such as the drama-echo of moving from inside to outside and
6 Ibid 9 Ann Cline: A Hut recognising extreme spatial contrast at the threshold, offers potential to both
7 Ibid, p18 of One’s Own – Life
Outside the Circle of transform and resolve tension through architecture. (Fig 6)
Architecture, MIT Implications of the idea of place are wide-ranging. Concepts of place give rise
Press, Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 1998, to the notion of natural and man-made environments in which all things are
p28
interrelated through the commonality of human experience. These relationships
in turn contribute to condition the human psyche and responses.
Relation
Inhabiting a building involves a multitude of interactions and is usually
6 Threshold, Ocean View house
perceived as a sequence of experiences over time. This is a process through
which we ‘gather’ experiences. When extended to include relations
with the wider surroundings and to support a way of life, buildings engage
in what Aldo Van Eyck called ‘a ladder of relationships’8 to form an
enriched framework for day-to-day experience.
By supporting valued interactions and relations between things, as opposed
to creating more isolated or self-referential structures, architecture contributes
to our existential/dwelling in reconciliation with the world.
7 Peter O’Gorman’s analysis of the siting of the
Relationships between a building and the landscape can be created in many temple of Apollo Epikourios at Bassai, Greece
ways and have been a focus of study in our travels. Interest in the siting
of Greek temples led to a study tour to the ancient temple of Apollo Epikourios
at Bassai and a new understanding of how the local climate and the landscape
informed the unconventional siting decision. (Fig 7)
At a smaller scale and in relating the individual to the landscape, we have
looked for opportunities to visually connect a distant horizon to a small interior
element via a sequence of boundaries: by making the place of the window
seat (Fig 8) such that its primary boundary aligns with surrounding boundaries
of the room, the courtyard, the garden and horizon. The window seat in
8 Window seat, Ocean View house
this way becomes an active agent in the process of locating the viewer and
interconnecting what is near and far. (Fig 9)
The ordinariness and the extraordinariness of buildings
Buildings are made of ordinary commodities. They tend to be the result of
prudent adaptations of available resources assembled to fulfil enduring
functions of enclosure and shelter. Components such as wall, window and door
form important limits in determining possible design options.
Ann Cline describes how the placement of a small window in a modest wall
can shift the question from that of mere assembly and start to include
9 The ridge of the Ocean View house lies
consideration of the quality of light on an object, the potential for social theatre, parallel to the Coral Sea horizon line.
inside-outside relationships, scale and issues of subliminal spirituality.9 This
15

10 Ocean View house: the stepping platform,
ramp and stone steps interact with
the landscape, fall of the site and rocks.
11 Mooloomba house, Point Lookout: deck and
‘nest’ of woven timber railings
16
capacity lends extraordinary design potential to buildings.
The subtlety that transforms the ordinary, such as the positioning of Cline’s
window, derives from two opportunities. The first is the opportunity to
create simultaneous readings, or layers of meaning (not only/but also), and
the second is the opportunity to establish a world of interaction – where
things have interconnection in unity and balance. (Fig 10)
Obviously these are not the only ideas to drive architectural sensibilities
(as opposed to building goals) but they are among the most fundamental. These
are at the source of the Japanese wabi sabi and of the intentions in the work
of architects such as Alvar Aalto.
Range of experience
Architecture contributes one of its principal roles when a building acts as the
agent in establishing relationships and experience. The capacity of the
senses to register extremes of spatial enclosure extends also to the full range
of stimuli such as light, sound, texture and so on. Continued exposure to
any extreme condition eventually creates tension and an increased appetite
for its twin opposite.
The human capacity for remembering and for imagining places is revealed
in Malouf’s essay about the house of his childhood. In the wooden houses
of Brisbane, the verandah recurs, with its essential characteristics: raised off
the ground, placed towards the light and tucked under a lower roof. Below
the floor, in among the stumps, is the ‘wedge of deepening dark’, a subtropical
version of the European cellar.10
These two Brisbane place-types, the verandah and the undercroft –
like Bachelard’s cellar and attic11 – carry a psychic power. Places raised above
the ground such as nests, attics, bowers and tree-houses have association
with the sky and the superego. Caves, cellars, and places among in-ground
foundations are associated with the earth below and the id. These potent
places are sustained in the memory through myth and dreams and often find
their way via the imagination into the built world.
Characteristics of place can also be transferred through juxtaposition, form
and material. In Mooloomba house, the northern deck – with its woven
battenwork balustrades, perched position among trees and tendency to tremble
underfoot – can be experienced simultaneously as verandah and nest. (Fig 11)
Powerful interaction between polar opposites can occur when they appear
to exist simultaneously and where the opposites are synthesised in one space
in a stable coexistence. The studio in Mooloomba house is an attempt at this
synthesis. Constructing an ‘aedicular’ frame within the studio creates an inner
space (defined by four braced posts) within the space of the room which is
itself defined by the glazed exterior walls on three sides. As a consequence, the
10 David Malouf: op 12 St John Wilson uses space beyond the aedicule within the studio is experienced as outside space,
cit, p266 the example of the
11 Gaston Bachelard: aedicule, a space set
creating ambiguity in terms of the real outside space of the landscape. This play
The Poetics of Space, within another space, between inside and outside spaces12 is amplified through the large posts
Beacon, Boston, as a play on inside-
1969, p6 outside. ‘Architecture and bracing members of the ‘little house’ that appear more sheltering than the
offers a whole slender, fine-grained components of the exterior wall. (Fig 12)
typology of counter-
forms to the “positions”
experienced in Use
this body language.’
‘Louis Kahn once said Architecture, in creating a framework for a way of life, is assertive in that it
that “certain forms
imply certain functions
determines many of the patterns of use in a place. If, however, a building design
and certain functions is limited to pragmatic considerations only, then memory and imagination
call for certain forms”.’ 12 Mooloomba house: aedicule
Colin St John Wilson:
are not fully engaged and relationships beyond the utilitarian are restricted.
op cit, pp xiv, 14, 18 When the pragmatic, on the other hand, is balanced by an empathic
consideration for its experience, this same assertiveness can present itself as
pleasurable. The simple human response of experiencing pleasure in the use of
buildings signals a closer fit with needs and enhancement of everyday life.
A building acquires a poetic dimension where the architecture engages the
appetite of the senses and enters the imagination. And assertiveness in
architecture may present itself more as an invitation than a command, where
some choice and interaction are offered, where there is a fit with the needs
of everyday life and where the poetic is experienced in the act of use.
In terms of designing in a subtropical climate, the most direct intervention
is to select the preferred orientation and make walls and roofs that can
moderate the sunlight, heat and wind. The tall, sliding-folding doors of the
studio at Mooloomba house, for example, support both the spatial poetic
and the moderation of the internal climate – making the interior-exterior nature
of the room a possibility. (Fig 13)
13 Mooloomba house: tall doors
Patterns of use
In some of our projects we have included ways that a house might
accommodate changes in family needs over time. In these projects, interaction
is through direct intervention with changeable elements. The Redbank Plains
house was made for a family whose young children shared a large dormitory-
playroom. The design of the structural system and area zoning offered simple
choices for a re-ordering to form separate bedrooms as children grew older.
The Rosebery house is planned so that in later years teenagers can be
accommodated, with independent access and facilities, on the lower level of the
house, while parents can, without structural change, occupy the upper level.
The Indooroopilly house and the Wellington Point house each consist
of two pavilions linked by landscape-frames and courtyards. In this way, choices
are offered so that two generations can share a garden, or one pavilion can
accommodate a home business.
17
 Occasions 13 John Summerson:
‘An Interpretation
Sometimes places are formed to suggest space for an occasion or invite a
special use where the architect – like an attentive host – anticipates the
requirements of the setting. On the other hand, overly prescribed settings can
become either constraining or superfluous. At Ocean View house, a sheltered
place is made as an outdoor room high on the hillside, out of the wind,
overlooking a distant coastal plain. The stone fireplace at the heart of the house
opens onto this protected deck and extends its use for outdoor dining well
into the autumn months.
Places for incidental occasions are also made between the house at Point
Lookout and the landscape, mostly as out-of-doors rooms, (Fig 14) to offer a
choice of places to occupy on the periphery of the central gathering room or the
site. A winter sun-trap seat, a raised lookout and decks provide opportunities
for retreat at the threshold without complete exclusion from group activity.
14 Mooloomba house: the outdoor room seen
from the upper gallery
Inside-outside and inbetween places
The pleasure of placing oneself in a sheltered setting is first experienced in
childhood play such as getting under a table or into a cubby house.
John Summerson writes that the relationship formed between the child and the
miniature shelter offers a delight and a serene pleasure that endures in adult
life. In camping and sailing, ‘there is the fascination of the miniature shelter
which excludes the elements by only a narrow margin and intensifies the sense
of security in a hostile world’.13
These two states of being, either sheltered within the secure interior or
exposed on the hostile exterior, are spatial opposites. An abrupt transition from
inside to outside tends to be experienced as a shock, followed by a desire
for the tension to be eased and for these spatial opposites to be reconciled.
Tension is at its greatest at the threshold, and the heightened experience
makes the threshold a place distinct from others. ‘We are inside or outside; or
on the threshold between. There are no other places to be.’14
The threshold becomes a place where the interactive tension between inside
and outside will be determined, a tension either reduced by resolving
polarities to coexist in a balanced relationship, or heightened as a moment of
drama and reorientation. (Fig 15) The smallest project offers opportunities
15 Lookout house: the verandah/deck threshold
to create and mediate spatial relationships between interior rooms and the
surroundings. Moving from inside, across a threshold, to outside offers a simple
sequence through three places. In the gentle environment of the subtropics, this
sequence can be a recurring experience throughout the day. The widespread
incorporation of verandahs in mediating spatial experience introduces the
potential for a new layer of drama that is not necessarily predicted by either the
inside or the outside. A roofed, open-sided verandah overlooking a garden
18
or a walled courtyard open to the sky is a place that has not only the combined
of Gothic’, Heavenly properties of spatial enclosure and exposure but also a role in engaging
Mansions and Other interactive activities.
Essays on Architecture,
Norton, New York, Threshold places such as those made by the courtyard, porch, verandah
1963, p2
14 Colin St John
and planted pergola or trelliswork are included in our projects with the idea
Wilson: op cit, p6 that they contribute to the experience of the poetic in the everyday transactions
between inside and outside. These transitional spaces, because of their
interactive role, may be more charged in their architectural contribution than
16 Mt Nebo house: the
the primary interior space. Thresholds are often required to make a network open stairs
of place-alliances between the interior through to the garden and larger terrain.
The staircase is a precarious threshold where the senses need to be alert.
Heightened awareness, coupled with the spatial drama of descending or rising
through space, make the stair a place for a more self-conscious experience
and is therefore of particular architectural interest. The open staircase in the
Mt Nebo house is created as a climb on the outer walls of a tower, (Fig 16)
where the sense of exposure is heightened while landscape views are
extended. The compensating enclosure of the timber battenwork screen is made
more containing by its curved form. The spatial sequencing is created from
earth to sky and from sky to earth.
Buildings are expressions of social ecologies
Architecture contributes one of its principal roles when buildings act as agents
in social relationships rather than being passive containers.
Houses are places of privacy existing in a structured world of public order
(or disorder). Privacy can be traced along a gradient, from the individual
through degrees of interaction sanctioned by society and the environment,
and through definitions of family and social groups: neighbour, suburb
and town. Each boundary between places, from those set aside for greatest
privacy and those for maximum exposure to public order, is moderated by
a myriad of signals adjusting social relationships.
Built environments comprise complex overlapping patterns of numerous
interactions including a variety of ecologies, both physical and social. (Fig 17)
This is a fundamental role played out by elements of a building: to provide
17 The Greek village: a complex pattern of
opportunities for the appropriate social moderation and stage settings to overlapping relationships
aid, enhance or dramatise social interaction. When that ladder of relationships
is not addressed or is corrupted, the building fails to support social ease and
can contribute to disfunction/dysfunction.
Social theatre
On the basis of need and problem-solving, architectural design necessarily
orders various movement patterns, sequences, connections and separations.
19
 To fulfil the additional role of enhancing the spirit of the occasion or the sense
of place is to contribute to the much larger idea that the building is an agent
of interaction rather than a passive container.
The sequence of arriving and departing, of greeting and farewelling guests,
for instance, is a recurring and often complex ritual that can be mediated
by architecture.
At Ocean View house, the entry gate in the long south wall is marked out by
a gable peak seen from afar on arrival at the top of the exposed hill. The
transition into the house is drawn out as a sequence of thresholds to shed mud
at the timber cattle grid and to slow the pace for the spatial drama of entering
from a closed porch onto a vast view to the distant horizon. Visitors step
from the porch onto a flat rock and the timber arrival deck, the more intimate
place of the foreground with its seat and fireplace offering a place for
welcoming out of the wind. (Fig 18)
18 Ocean View house: the timber entry deck
The place of entry at the Rosebery house has a large sliding screen that acts
as a valve to allow the family to moderate access to the house. The opened
screen gives access into the family realm via the lower deck. The closed
screen directs movement along the threshold and up stairs to a deck between
communal rooms. This second entry sequence leads the visitor up stairs
parallel with the gully floor and rewards with a raised view of the landscape
towards the river. The large sliding screen was also imagined, in its design,
as a proscenium curtain to the stage behind for plays, parties or exhibitions –
a stage that could incorporate the landscape on a minor axis.
A campsite on an open deck forms the entry at the Mt Nebo house. The
process of arriving begins 100 metres away, and the entry sequence through
the bush prepares the visitor for surprise and an incremental discovery
of the bush landscape. The campsite is partly sheltered by the curved landscape
screen that follows the staircase up to one room above another, and widens
at the ground level to embrace the campfire place. (Fig 19)
Buildings carry metaphors of cultural memory
Architecture, in resolving conflicting demands to offer security and consistency
without boredom, can also seek to make places that have the capacity to
stimulate remembering and imagining. The poetic opportunity for buildings to
engage the imagination can emerge in the use of metaphor in architecture.
19 Mt Nebo house: a sheltered campsite
On metaphor, Aristotle wrote: ‘Strange words [and things] simply puzzle
us, ordinary words [and things] convey only what we already know; it is from
metaphor that we can best get hold of something fresh.’15 George Laloff argues
that ‘Metaphors as linguistic expressions are possible precisely because
there are metaphors in a person’s conceptual system.’16 And some of the most
potent metaphors in the collective memory are related to landscape.17
20
15 Aristotle: ‘Poetics’, 18 Kenneth Frampton: Each of these three observations has contributed ways of thinking about
Chapter 21, The Critical Studies in Tectonic
Idiom – Metaphor, Culture: The Poetics metaphor in our projects. In the Mooloomba house, the bower-nest metaphor
Hawkes, T, Methuen, of Construction of the raised deck is called up by a set of contributing gestures including
London, 1972 in Nineteenth and
16 George Laloff: Twentieth Century the open-weave timber slat balustrade, its curved shape, its relatively snug
Metaphors We Live By, Architecture, MIT Press, size, its juxtaposition with the tree branches, and experiencing its slight
University of Chicago Cambridge,
Press, Chicago, Massachusetts, 1995, movement high above ground. In this project the intention has been twofold:
1980, p6 pp14, 18
17 Simon Schama: 19 Edward Casey:
to relate the belvedere to the notion of inhabiting the existing banksia grove,
Landscape and Remembering: and to imply the first house – the bower in paradise. (Fig 20)
Memory, Fontana A Phenomenological 20 Mooloomba house: the bower in paradise
Press, 1996, p61 Study, Indiana
University Press, 1987, Landscape
p197
The concept of ‘weave’ in landscape-building interaction
Kenneth Frampton describes the use of weaving in traditional Japanese
buildings as a symbolic interaction with cyclic agrarian traditions. He writes
that direct links to ‘spatio-temporal rhythms’ are bound up in the act
of building in Japan: ‘That this culture is quite literally woven throughout
is further substantiated by the dovetailing interrelationship of every
conceivable element in the traditional Japanese house.’18 Frampton, like Gunter
Nitschke in From Shinto to Ando, describes the Japanese experience of the
constructed environment as one of links between culture, spirit and religion.
The idea is based in a literal and metaphorical weaving of the ‘spirit’
of the landscape with the spatial form of the building. The concept recurs in
many forms and cultures, particularly where religious and spiritual ideals are
based in nature – as in traditional Balinese architecture. (Fig 21)
21 Balinese temple setting
There are also many adapted examples of this powerful metaphor in 20th-
century architecture, most often occurring as landscape-based images.
Alvar Aalto’s summer house at Muuratsalo is the ruin in the landscape, and
Frank Lloyd Wright’s house for the Kaufmanns at Bear Run is the waterfall.
Landscape place
Getting to know a place takes time, a slowing down and sensual attentiveness.
Malouf writes in his description of Brisbane that he only knows one place
well: the place of his earliest childhood experiences.
It is clear that we need to use some form of body-sensing empathy rather
than just looking at a place to develop ideas about space that are inclusive of
the full range of surrounding pre-existences.
The natural landscape provides an underlying matrix for the coherence of its
parts. When we sensuously enjoy the landscape, we tune into it and experience
‘an indivisibility’ between the landscape and the body.19
Architecture that makes an interaction with the wider landscape can
be responsive to parallels between inner and outer boundaries of a place. The
curvature of a Greek temple plinth may have been made with a subtle
21
 correspondence to the curvature of the earth’s horizon; and with this parallel,
the ladder of place relations is established between them.
Boundaries introduce the outer limits of a place and simultaneously begin
to contain a place. The outer limits of ‘home’ appear as soon as familiar
landmarks are recognised in the surroundings, signalling the widest perimeter
of homecoming as we approach.
In the subtropical landscapes of South-East Queensland, detail comes to the
fore then sinks into the definition of the background. Unlike the trees of other
countries, the eucalyptus is transparent. Its structure of trunk, branch and
twig is clearly visible whether standing alone or clustered into a greater whole.
Its leaves form colour splashes in a green-grey continuum. We like to think
that the graded layers of our architecture and their tectonic transparency relate
these buildings to their place.
22 Ocean View house: architectural form and
the landscape
Landscape interactions
Building and landscape interactions in our projects are established in many
ways. The landscape may play the role of architecture, establishing or
extending spatial and conceptual order: the Goldieslie house. The building may
be responsive to landscape, reflecting its forms and scale: Ocean View house.
(Fig 22) Or the architecture can play the role of landscape: the Rosebery house.
Relations
Every place is unique and is uniquely placed in its surroundings. Where this
relationship can be made intelligible and conciliatory, the experience brings
with it a sense of existential wellbeing.
Open wooden houses, raised up on stumps above the sloping ground,
collectively reveal the larger landform of the whole hill and contribute to the
coherence and intelligibility of the topography of Brisbane. The hills and
the meandering river define much of the genius loci of Brisbane, and Malouf
describes the way in which their presence is intensified through our
experience of the place.
Individual projects can also support the coherence of the surrounding
landscape. Siting the Rosebery house along the higher contours of the site
maintains the continuity of the gully floor as watershed to the river
and amplifies the form of the landscape volume. (Fig 23) The experience of the
landscape from the house on its small plot of land is one of living on the
side of a long valley that links the ridge to the river.
23 Rosebery house: the architectural form
amplifies the landscape experience. Where the topography is dominant and the building program is slight, the
form of the built structure can describe and clarify the landscape and building
relations. At Ocean View, the eaves, floor levels and ramp follow the slope of
the ground, and the long plan traces along the contours. At the place of entry to
22
the site, the horizontality of the diagonal ridge can be seen, underscoring
the distant horizon line between the ocean and the sky. The visual, functional
and experiential relationships between building and landscape are
supported in establishing coherence.
In our projects we defer to the landscape where its inherent qualities
can form part of the final experience of a place. This can mean that the most
obvious siting solution is not the one to follow.
The siting of the Mooloomba house along the western side boundary was
determined in order to preserve an existing grove of trees and to maintain the
coherence of the hillside topography by leaving the centre of the narrow
site uninterrupted by building. While this decision involved sacrificing ocean
views from the house, a panorama view of the ocean is reserved for the
open belvedere at the upper level.
Interactions between architecture and the landscape of the site can also be
extended to include mythical landscapes such as the Garden of Eden, the sacred
grove or landscapes of the imagination and dreams. At Mooloomba house,
a ‘mythical garden’ and constructed forest coexist with an extant banksia grove
on the site, (Fig 24) gathering elements of past, future and present.
24 Mooloomba house: the banksia garden
Landscape: real, imaginary and mythical
It is not so difficult to imagine the web of Brisbane’s overgrown backyards
as a primitive paradise. In the subtropics it is possible to live in a sheltered
garden under a wide-brimmed, openwork bower – almost all year. An
abundance of fruiting and flowering trees forms a citywide network, a kind
of ark of the species, for possums, bush turkeys, pythons, fruit bats, water
dragons and other creatures.
The paradise garden is a recurring ideal brought to landscapes. Artist
William Robinson, painting the rainforest near Kyogle, includes a rock pool
where Adam and Eve (or is it Bill and Shirley?) float among rainbows and
shafts of light. The mythological paradise garden with its ‘primitive hut’ recurs
in abstracted form in Mooloomba house where the bower’s nest of ‘inwoven
shade’ is raised among the tree branches, juxtaposing the skeletal framework
of the trees with open-weave timber battenwork. (Fig 25) The fractured
25 Mooloomba house: ‘inwoven shade’
and dissipated subtropical sunlight tends to ease muscle tension around the
eyes, and comforting breezes find their way through the open weave.
In the Ormond Terrace house, the extended landscape frame forms both
garden and aedicule at the threshold between the interior and the bushland.
The ancient place of the sacred grove continues to find its way into
architecture. This landscape element is recalled at the Mooloomba house along
the west, where a constructed forest of cypress posts is interspersed among
growing trees. In the studio, the posts form a clearing for an aedicule, or ‘little
23
 house’, set in a forest. Respect for and experience of existing landscapes may
be amplified by modest inclusions of mythical and imaginary landscapes.
Landscape frames
In a number of projects we have introduced a wooden frame as a super-scale
trellis in order to mediate the threshold to the interior and to construct a
vertical landscape with the surroundings.
At the Rosebery house, a timber frame stretches along the entire site to mask
the domestic scale of the interior, shade the west facade, restore the scale
of the gully and underscore the spatial direction of the land’s fall towards the
river. (Fig 26) The geometry of the screen allows natural irregularity within
a proportioned and regular primary framework. Overgrown by climbing plants,
the giant shade trellis can re-establish the vine layers typical of the gully
26 Rosebery house: timber frame as super-scale
trellis vegetation and recreate the western boundary as a vertical landscape.
At Ocean View house, a timber frame is attached to the external wall cladding
on the south, and emerges as an open cage where the cladding is no longer
required on the west. The timber battenwork is dimensioned to refine the scale
of the profiled metal sheeting and to introduce animation on the wall through
shadow lines that change with the sun angles. The timber frame was imagined
to support flowering creepers and the occasional farm implement.
A timber frame at the Mooloomba house is fixed outside a west-facing
translucent wall for shade. The vines growing on the external frame cast
shifting silhouettes as the sun crosses the afternoon sky. (Fig 27) The shadow
play animation on the interior contributes to the experience of indoor-outdoor
simultaneity and reflects the season and time of day.
In a series of projects, the timber frame is made as a field of posts and beams
to incorporate both pre-existing structures and the landscape. In these
projects the frame acts to girdle a set of interior rooms, establish thresholds
and form a structured landscape.
27 Mooloomba house: timber batten screen
shadow play The Forest house (Ormond Terrace) began as a 1950s cottage that offered
only spatial extremes: the closed house interior and the open forest. Its three
rooms were set out along the contours of a hillside extending into the
adjoining bushland.
The three rooms and adjacent hillside were overlaid with an open timber
framework of posts and beams to stitch these places together physically
and spatially. To increase the spatial contrast with the exterior and to intensify
interior containment, the ceiling height of the three rooms was lowered
and curved. The timber framework constructed to a simple grid, in contrast to
the irregular spacing of trees, is stained black to recede with the shadow of the
foliage and forms a web of enclosure among tree trunks and below canopies.
The framework adjacent to the three rooms was subsequently either roofed or
24
walled with acrylic or steel sheeting. These semi-interior spaces open onto
decks set within the framework and among trees.
The hardwood frame at the Forest house was conceived of as a large pergola
or trellis for climbing plants, a structure that could simultaneously surround
the interior and engage with the space of the trees, giving rise to the concept of
the house becoming landscape or the landscape becoming house. (Fig 28)
The grid of timber posts and beams overlaid on a house core and garden, or
built as a peripheral framework between house and garden, was also used
on other projects where houses were to be extended or modified. In most cases
the timber frame offered an indeterminate or open form to allow adjustment
in the relationship between the spatial contrasts of inside and the outside.
28 Ormond Terrace (Forest) house: open timber
frame
Fragmented plan
The subtropics encourage the notion that the whole terrain is equally habitable:
that places in the garden and rooms in the house could become mingled in
one field with a variety of spatial conditions and characters. Occupying
the landscape as a civilised campsite is stimulated by desire for intimacy with
the natural world that is not merely viewed but is heard, smelled, tasted,
felt and sensed. Some traditional houses in Japan and Bali are formed as one
inhabited territory or compound where pavilions, thresholds and gardens
can be perceived as one spatial field containing distinct places. The fragmented
plan requires that ‘outside’ as well as ‘inside’ areas be perceived as a network
of positive spaces of formed rooms and pathways. (Fig 29)
Like the long, thin house plan – one room deep – the fragmented plan can
enhance opportunities for landscape relations, place-making, threshold spaces,
solar and wind control, privacy and outlook. Movement between dispersed
places can increase opportunities for constructing sightlines to describe both
the surrounding territory and the landscape of the house.
Where the internal rooms are on the brink of exposure to outside, the spatial
quality of the interior wants to be reinforced as an enclosed place with internal
focus. In many of our projects, one room is made more interior or cave-like,
with a fireplace, a solid corner and a lower curved ceiling. At the Tomsgate Way
house, the fireplace is made as a room within the room.
29 Lookout house: tower and bathhouse are
tethered to the existing house
Architecture
In order to fulfil its social role, the practical art of architecture involves the
architect in the organisation of many competing functional, technical
and economic demands that are often outside the direct control of the architect.
On the one hand, optimising these measurable, pragmatic factors can be an
informative part of the design process (and clearly can be done by a machine)
but on the other hand, it does not by itself create a work of architecture. Human
25
 inhabitation, placed at the core of architecture, brings with it the entire human
condition, and the responsibility of the architect to contribute to the quality ‘architecture
of life. Consideration of what it means to be human includes not only physical
needs but also an awareness of human phenomena such as memory “existential foothold”’.
‘Man dwells when he
and imagination.
Architecture, with its human focus, is not created by the organisation of
purely pragmatic determinants. Optimising measurable data, technology and
economic factors alone result in impoverished environments. The process
of architectural design is dependent on a creative proposition to make
the imaginative leap. Propositions bring with them values and parameters.
A proposition, then, may be tested against the pragmatic determinants of
a project, and the developed hypothesis can continue to act as the guide in the
process of design.
Up, down and round about
Norberg-Schulz explores how architecture, through a greater awareness
of functionality, can not only create a practical, constructed building but also
offer the inhabitant ‘an existential foothold’.20
He proposes that to describe and characterise the landscape of the natural
world, we need to find more than operational or visual terms. Norberg-Schulz
cites Martin Heidegger’s description of earth and sky in order to reveal the
clear distinction between these two realms and their significance for dwelling.
‘Earth is the serving bearer, blossoming and fruiting, spreading out in
rock and water, rising up into plant and animal …’, and ‘The sky is the vaulting
path of the sun, the course of the changing moon, the glitter of the stars,
the year’s seasons, the light and dusk of day, the gloom and glow of night, the
clemency and inclemency of the weather, the drifting clouds and blue
depth of the ether …’.21 All human dwelling is in the place between these two
landscapes: in being on the earth we are already under the sky.22
Human experience of the landscapes of the earth ‘below’ and sky ‘above’
establishes the body’s awareness of the two prime directions. This awareness
has given rise to relations between buildings, earth and sky. A constructed
earthbound place is found below, in the foundations, cellar, undercroft
and cave. The sky place is made in the ceiling, attic, bower and lookout. The
earth and sky offer an inhabited place, the directions of up and down and
also the surrounding horizon – the meeting of earth and sky.
Houses can condense the experience of being placed in the landscape where
they rest on the ground and reach towards the sky and contribute to defining
the horizon.
26
20 Christian 23 Edward Casey: Place memory
Norberg-Schulz writes, op cit, p213
24 Ibid Most people who grew up in the timber and tin houses of Brisbane remember
represents a means
to give man an
25 Ibid, p185 the experience of sleeping on the verandah on hot summer nights with the rain
26 Ibid, p191
27 Ibid, p185 drumming on the metal roof overhead. Actual occasions are more difficult
can orientate himself
to remember because while we associate memory with time, time usually acts
within and identify to disperse memory. On the other hand it is difficult to remember sleeping
himself with an
environment, or, in on the verandah without also recalling the place itself. A place collects and
short when preserves memory and ‘holds the past in place’.23
he experiences the
environment Some places are more memorable than others because they present more
as meaningful.’ cues for remembering. A place that differentiates itself from other places
Christian Norberg-
Schulz: Genius Loci: and has distinct features within it will be more memorable than a place that is
Towards a easily confused with other places. Similarly, a place that is enduring and
Phenomenology of
Architecture, stable as a setting for experiences is more memorable than one where things
Academy Editions,
London, 1980, p5
continually appear or disappear.24
21 Ibid, p10 Because we come to be oriented in and to occupy a place with our bodies,
22 Ibid
we can sense or register the boundary of place, its quality of containment
and its protection against our being dispersed. It was Aristotle’s view that the
act of containing or ‘holding around’ is the primary dynamic of place.25
Where the fit in a place is almost coincident with the body, there is a feeling
of being fully contained in a place, often accompanied by a sense of the
intimate and the cosy. This experience of ‘bodily implacement’ offers the body
the reassurance of being inserted into the world.26
We experience that some places are more supporting and sustaining than
others. With awareness of what makes a memorable place, architects can
with more certainty know what places in the terrain to preserve and to mend,
and how new sustaining places can be created.
Perceiving place is clouded in our time, Casey suggests, by the dominance
of temporality and the idea that the space of the earth is empty, endless,
homogenous and directionless. Stripped of its local variance and inherent
character, place becomes merely a spatial ‘site’ defined only by its relative
position within geometric coordinates: ‘As a result, a site is indifferent to what
might occupy it – and to what we might remember about it.’
‘In order to be at all, one must be in a place: supported and sustained there.’27
27