THE HOUSE
The house is a project by the author and architect Elizabeth Watson-Brown11 that sought to apply Hildebrand’s ideas from The Wright Space. The movement sequence utilises bridges and falls, low branches, stairs and ladders, high and low ceilings, and darkness and light to entice movement embodying hazard and mystery. The building has complex spatial interlocking within a seemingly simple orthogonal plan. It is detailed plainly in counterpoint to the visual intricacy of the adjacent gnarled Poinciana tree as the visual interplay of shadows and reflections on the building fabric is seen to provide complexity and order.
The house has a double height glazed wall to the northern garden and street, affording abundant and self-evident prospect. The achievement of a compensating degree of refuge is less immediately apparent, but results from semi-encircling spaces to east and west that spatially contain the living area and a defensible low-ceilinged retreat zone at the back of the space. In daily life, the lowest fixed pane of the operable window wall is fitted with a translucent screen at that affords surveillance of the street while standing and anonymity when seated.
Functionally, the northern elevation is designed to maximise openness. Fifty percent of the window wall remains open for half of the year. Interlocking sliding doors dissolve the corner of the room to open the operational kitchen onto the semiroofed and canvas-sided deck. Moving from the balcony to the kitchen there are five incremental thresholds of increasing spatial enclosure, blurring the distinction between exteriority and interiority. Ambiguity of enclosure is further pursued with the bedroom balcony that can be opened or closed, and is half inside and half outside. In a climate where the natural desire is to live and sleep outside, under the stars and enveloped by breezes, this dissolution of architectural enclosure is innately sensual.
The transparency of glass sometimes leads designers to believe that it is a material that dissolves spatial enclosure, but in a warm humid climate the hard reflective surface is all too apparent as a barrier between the body and the breeze. Reflectivity does, however, enhance visual connectivity of inside and out, if, as in this house, there is external foreground detail to be reflected beyond the glass surface. By day, the reflected greenery is virtually deep within the room, by night reflections double the size of the internal volume to encircle the tree. The half open wall comprising both virtual and real openness further blurs the ambiguous boundary. The architecture does not stop at the plane of the window. From inside, internal walls and ceilings extend out to the habitable balconies and eaves beyond.
This intellectual conception of engaging in the larger world while securely housed in the building’s interior is a conscious attempt to make manifest Wilson’s transcendent simultaneity of envelopment and exposure. In this house, ambiguous openness is enriched by the symbolic meanings that can be ascribed to the view inside or out. Inside/outside can be read as house/garden, architecture/landscape, art/nature, family/city, or individual/world depending on one’s philosophical musings. The fact that the relationship between these entities is one of connectivity and continuity rather than dualistic opposition is a source of considerable psychological solace.
Reference
Reflections on Inside-Outside Space
PETER SKINNER
Skinner, P.R, Reflections on Inside-Outside Space, in Newton, C., Kaji-O’Grady, Wollan, S.(eds) Design + Research; Project based research in architecture, 2nd International Conference of the Australasian Association of Schools of Architecture, Melbourne, 28-30 Sept 2003.(http://www.arbld.unimelb.edu.au/events/conferences/aasa/papers)
Elizabeth Watson Architect.
http://www.elizabethwatsonbrownarchitects.com.au/ (Accessed February 25, 2010)