Last week I went to see an exhibition at the University of Melbourne’s Wunderlich Gallery of nine small buildings designed by the Melburnian architects John Denton and Barrie Marshall of Denton Corker Marshall. The buildings were almost all houses and I found one of these particularly striking: Marshall’s Phillip Island House (designed 1983, completed 1992).
The design consists of a large walled courtyard (33 x 33 metres) pressed into sand dunes overlooking the sea on Phillip Island (a couple of hours drive southeast of Melbourne). The house, which is only five and a half metres wide, occupies one side of the yard and a garage lies on the adjacent side; opposite the garage is a portal into the yard; opposite the house is a blank retaining wall. The whole thing is polished concrete, steel and glass, but rising up to the retaining walls and over the house and garage are the vegetated sand dunes. The house has windows and entrances north onto the courtyard and south onto the coastline. There are some good pictures of it here and here.
This will be my first attempt to write about a work of architecture. However, rather than write about this building as architecture, i.e. in the context of architectural history or in its design details, I want to write about this work of architecture as a work of art.
It goes without saying that each work of art should be assessed by the criteria of its particular type (painting, music, poetry, etc.), that is, according to the technique by which it gives sensuous form to its idea. We distinguish architecture from the other arts by the fact that its material and content are matter itself. While I have made the case previously (in an essay on Virgil) that matter is material and material is content, that was in a rather more (but not entirely) figurative sense. In this instance, by “matter” I mean the inert materials of the earth that have been hewn, shaped, fired and so on to create the materials of building.
It is an obvious point worth repeating that materials are as important to architecture aesthetically as they are structurally. My colleague at the Melbourne School of Design, Alan Pert of NORD, once said of his own approach to design, “It all begins with materials.” The best architecture, in my opinion, allows the particular materiality of its materials to appear, rather than covering them with the blankness of paint or – one of the ugliest things ever made – coloured metal cladding; neither of these finishes is capable of communicating materiality with any aesthetic sensitivity. In the façades of Melbourne’s nineteenth-century terrace houses, cast iron, bluestone, polychrome brick, slate and unpainted stucco (mostly now painted) were the standard materials. With these materials the instant city of Marvellous Melbourne was built and through them its colonial bourgeois society expressed itself. Victorian taste (and the material conditions of the society) determined how these materials were worked and presented, or, in Gernot Böhme’s terms, how their materiality was staged. The bluestone foundation, the arcuated brick window, the cast-iron balustrade – these are structural elements that make their materials manifest to aesthetic experience. They prove the technical skill of human labour to transform inert matter into material, to order it according to the abstract understanding and in so doing to strive for the ideal (to put it in Hegelian terms).
These observations about the Melbourne terrace house show, however, that there is more to the content of architecture than simply matter. When we ask the question “what is this poem about?” the answer is often “love.” Can a building be about love? I think the answer must be yes, and that it can be so without recourse to literal featurism in the form of a Venturian duck or decorated shed. It might be easier to grasp this if we think of a courthouse being about the law or a church being about religious community. The boom-style Melbourne terrace house is about bourgeois colonialism. Nevertheless, I don’t want to redact my earlier statement about matter being the content of architecture. The poem, whether or not it is erotic, is first and foremost about language. The building is about earthly matter, which it uses to give sensuous form to an idea.
In some instances, architecture does not simply use materials from the earth to create its form, but rather, like land art, it uses (a patch of) the earth itself, and modifies it in order to create a dwelling place or a place of business or of worship. In a sense, all architecture does this, all architecture is to an extent “landscape” architecture; with Phillip Island House, however, this process – of using the earth as material beyond simply the source of materials – is overwhelmingly palpable.
Phillip Island House is about landscape and about the human practice of transforming landscapes along rational lines in order to create a dwelling. The materials of its composition are not only concrete, glass and steel, but also the earth and vegetation of its setting. Through the building-up of the surrounding dunes to form berms around the courtyard, Marshall has created by artifice the effects of natural history, viz. the slow movement of sand dunes and their colonisation by vegetation. In 2004, I visited the tenth-century church of Saint Caomhán on Inis Oírr (an island in Galway Bay), which is now several metres below ground level due to the movement of sand dunes. Phillip Island House’s framed artificial naturalness (or naturalistic artifice) we moderns call the picturesque. The strong lines of the concrete structure are interrupted by the informal intrusion of the “natural” vegetation. Much has been made of the severity of the building, but the house would only be severe if it excluded these natural elements, which are as much a part of the structure as the concrete retaining walls.
In order to build a dwelling, we must first delineate the space of building, the domain of the householders; we must make a clearing in the forest (for Vico, this is the beginning of civil society). This is precisely the function of the courtyard in Phillip Island House, which begins by pressing a simple geometric form onto the landscape in order to establish a domestic realm. In this respect, the courtyard is no different to the internal courtyard of a farmhouse. One can imagine chickens and vegetable gardens occupying part of the space (the reason for their absence, however, should become clear below).
The house itself, a long, narrow box on the courtyard’s southern end punctuated by windows both into the courtyard and out to the sea, is the real gateway to the dwelling place. For the dweller, the house frames both the domesticated world of the courtyard and the outer world of the beach and the sea. It is too narrow to be discretely directed onto both spaces (the bounded and the unbounded) and as such is liminal to them both. In spite of its sunken positioning and use of raw concrete, it is not a bunker (as some have characterised it). It engages far too openly with its environment to qualify for that name. Rather, it is a portal from the geometric space of the courtyard, the clearing for the dwelling (the house is always on the edge of the clearing, never in the middle), onto the wilderness of Bass Strait. Indeed, the house could have been called “Gatehouse.”
Phillip Island House is a gatehouse because it is a beach house, that is, not an everyday home but one in which holidays are taken. As such, the house itself is peripheral to the true domestic space of the composition, the courtyard, which is appropriately emptied of any domestic functions. But it also protects this space from the outer world, the beach which it nevertheless opens up to, because, as a house, its success depends on the security of its spatial designation of domesticity. There is a necessity to the courtyard beyond any architectural featurism.
The genius of a house like Fallingwater is its ability to maintain an aesthetic sensitivity to its natural surroundings and even to integrate with them in spite of the violent imposition of its form on the landscape. Phillip Island House is completely different in its design, setting and function to Fallingwater but nevertheless has this principle in common with it. Moreover, the success of Phillip Island House lies in the way it takes its materials as its subject matter and through them gives form – in a completely new way – to the idea of the beach house.
Melbourne, 8–11 June 2013
The design consists of a large walled courtyard (33 x 33 metres) pressed into sand dunes overlooking the sea on Phillip Island (a couple of hours drive southeast of Melbourne). The house, which is only five and a half metres wide, occupies one side of the yard and a garage lies on the adjacent side; opposite the garage is a portal into the yard; opposite the house is a blank retaining wall. The whole thing is polished concrete, steel and glass, but rising up to the retaining walls and over the house and garage are the vegetated sand dunes. The house has windows and entrances north onto the courtyard and south onto the coastline. There are some good pictures of it here and here.
This will be my first attempt to write about a work of architecture. However, rather than write about this building as architecture, i.e. in the context of architectural history or in its design details, I want to write about this work of architecture as a work of art.
It goes without saying that each work of art should be assessed by the criteria of its particular type (painting, music, poetry, etc.), that is, according to the technique by which it gives sensuous form to its idea. We distinguish architecture from the other arts by the fact that its material and content are matter itself. While I have made the case previously (in an essay on Virgil) that matter is material and material is content, that was in a rather more (but not entirely) figurative sense. In this instance, by “matter” I mean the inert materials of the earth that have been hewn, shaped, fired and so on to create the materials of building.
It is an obvious point worth repeating that materials are as important to architecture aesthetically as they are structurally. My colleague at the Melbourne School of Design, Alan Pert of NORD, once said of his own approach to design, “It all begins with materials.” The best architecture, in my opinion, allows the particular materiality of its materials to appear, rather than covering them with the blankness of paint or – one of the ugliest things ever made – coloured metal cladding; neither of these finishes is capable of communicating materiality with any aesthetic sensitivity. In the façades of Melbourne’s nineteenth-century terrace houses, cast iron, bluestone, polychrome brick, slate and unpainted stucco (mostly now painted) were the standard materials. With these materials the instant city of Marvellous Melbourne was built and through them its colonial bourgeois society expressed itself. Victorian taste (and the material conditions of the society) determined how these materials were worked and presented, or, in Gernot Böhme’s terms, how their materiality was staged. The bluestone foundation, the arcuated brick window, the cast-iron balustrade – these are structural elements that make their materials manifest to aesthetic experience. They prove the technical skill of human labour to transform inert matter into material, to order it according to the abstract understanding and in so doing to strive for the ideal (to put it in Hegelian terms).
These observations about the Melbourne terrace house show, however, that there is more to the content of architecture than simply matter. When we ask the question “what is this poem about?” the answer is often “love.” Can a building be about love? I think the answer must be yes, and that it can be so without recourse to literal featurism in the form of a Venturian duck or decorated shed. It might be easier to grasp this if we think of a courthouse being about the law or a church being about religious community. The boom-style Melbourne terrace house is about bourgeois colonialism. Nevertheless, I don’t want to redact my earlier statement about matter being the content of architecture. The poem, whether or not it is erotic, is first and foremost about language. The building is about earthly matter, which it uses to give sensuous form to an idea.
In some instances, architecture does not simply use materials from the earth to create its form, but rather, like land art, it uses (a patch of) the earth itself, and modifies it in order to create a dwelling place or a place of business or of worship. In a sense, all architecture does this, all architecture is to an extent “landscape” architecture; with Phillip Island House, however, this process – of using the earth as material beyond simply the source of materials – is overwhelmingly palpable.
Phillip Island House is about landscape and about the human practice of transforming landscapes along rational lines in order to create a dwelling. The materials of its composition are not only concrete, glass and steel, but also the earth and vegetation of its setting. Through the building-up of the surrounding dunes to form berms around the courtyard, Marshall has created by artifice the effects of natural history, viz. the slow movement of sand dunes and their colonisation by vegetation. In 2004, I visited the tenth-century church of Saint Caomhán on Inis Oírr (an island in Galway Bay), which is now several metres below ground level due to the movement of sand dunes. Phillip Island House’s framed artificial naturalness (or naturalistic artifice) we moderns call the picturesque. The strong lines of the concrete structure are interrupted by the informal intrusion of the “natural” vegetation. Much has been made of the severity of the building, but the house would only be severe if it excluded these natural elements, which are as much a part of the structure as the concrete retaining walls.
In order to build a dwelling, we must first delineate the space of building, the domain of the householders; we must make a clearing in the forest (for Vico, this is the beginning of civil society). This is precisely the function of the courtyard in Phillip Island House, which begins by pressing a simple geometric form onto the landscape in order to establish a domestic realm. In this respect, the courtyard is no different to the internal courtyard of a farmhouse. One can imagine chickens and vegetable gardens occupying part of the space (the reason for their absence, however, should become clear below).
The house itself, a long, narrow box on the courtyard’s southern end punctuated by windows both into the courtyard and out to the sea, is the real gateway to the dwelling place. For the dweller, the house frames both the domesticated world of the courtyard and the outer world of the beach and the sea. It is too narrow to be discretely directed onto both spaces (the bounded and the unbounded) and as such is liminal to them both. In spite of its sunken positioning and use of raw concrete, it is not a bunker (as some have characterised it). It engages far too openly with its environment to qualify for that name. Rather, it is a portal from the geometric space of the courtyard, the clearing for the dwelling (the house is always on the edge of the clearing, never in the middle), onto the wilderness of Bass Strait. Indeed, the house could have been called “Gatehouse.”
Phillip Island House is a gatehouse because it is a beach house, that is, not an everyday home but one in which holidays are taken. As such, the house itself is peripheral to the true domestic space of the composition, the courtyard, which is appropriately emptied of any domestic functions. But it also protects this space from the outer world, the beach which it nevertheless opens up to, because, as a house, its success depends on the security of its spatial designation of domesticity. There is a necessity to the courtyard beyond any architectural featurism.
The genius of a house like Fallingwater is its ability to maintain an aesthetic sensitivity to its natural surroundings and even to integrate with them in spite of the violent imposition of its form on the landscape. Phillip Island House is completely different in its design, setting and function to Fallingwater but nevertheless has this principle in common with it. Moreover, the success of Phillip Island House lies in the way it takes its materials as its subject matter and through them gives form – in a completely new way – to the idea of the beach house.
Melbourne, 8–11 June 2013
