Robin Boyd Spatial Continuity [PDF]

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Robin Boyd

Australian architect Robin Boyd (1919–71) advocated tirelessly for the voice of Australian architects so that there could be an architecture that might speak to Australian conditions and sensibilities. His legacy continues in the work of contemporary Australian architects yet also prompts a way forward for architecture, particularly in relationship to the landscapes they inhabit through a quality of continuous space found in his work where the buildings are spatially reliant and sympathetic to the places they occupy. A selection of 22 projects are documented comprehensively in this book for the first time. This slice through Boyd’s body of work reveals a gifted, complex and contemporary thinker. Mauro Baracco is a practising architect and a director of Baracco+Wright Architects. He has a PhD in Architecture from and is also an Associate Professor at RMIT University in the School of Architecture and Design, Melbourne, Australia where he was the Deputy Dean of Landscape Architecture (2013–15) and is currently the Deputy Dean of International. His teaching, research and practice activity places the architect in the role of strategic thinker across disciplinary boundaries. Louise Wright is a practising Australian architect and a director of Baracco+ Wright Architects. She has a PhD in Architecture from and also is a sessional lecturer in design at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. Her architectural practice combines the academic and practice world. The work of Baracco+ Wright Architects is shifting more and more towards landscape-based approaches and has been described as quietly radical.

Robin Boyd Spatial continuity Mauro Baracco and Louise Wright

First published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 Mauro Baracco and Louise Wright The right of Mauro Baracco and Louise Wright to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloging in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-4724-7843-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-60675-0 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of figuresvii Forewordxv Acknowledgementsxix Introductionxxi PART I

Robin Boyd: Spatial continuity1 Bibliography51 PART II

Robin Boyd: Selected works55   1 Boyd House 1 1947

57

  2 Gillison House 1952

65

  3 Manning Clark House 1952

73

  4 Finlay House 1952–53

81

  5 Fenner House 1953–54

89

  6 Bridgeford House 1954

97

  7 Richardson House 1954

105

  8 Holford House 1956

113

  9 Haughton James House 1956

121

10 Southgate Fountain 1957–60

129

11 Boyd House 2 1958

137

12 Lloyd House 1959

145

vi  Contents

13 Clemson House 1959

153

14 Domain Park Flats 1960–62

161

15 Arnold House 1963–64

169

16 Baker House 1964–66 + Baker ‘Dower’ House 1966–68

177

17 Lawrence House + Flats 1966–68

191

18 Farfor Holiday Houses 1966–68

199

19 McClune House 1967–68

207

20 Featherston House 1967–69

215

21 Hegarty House 1969–72

225

Bibliography233 Index235

Figures

Part 1 0.1 Carnich Towers (unbuilt), Robin Boyd, 1969–71. 0.2 Current view from north east, Domain Park Flats 1960–62. 0.3 Current view from balcony towards Botanic Gardens, Domain Park Flats, Robin Boyd, 1960–62. 0.4 View of Southgate Fountains (demolished), Robin Boyd, 1957–60. 0.5 Current view of north façade, John Batman Motor Inn, Robin Boyd, 1962. 0.6 Current view from terrace, John Batman Motor Inn, Robin Boyd, 1962. 0.7 Jimmy Watson’s Wine Bar, façade, Robin Boyd, 1961–63. 0.8 Jimmy Watson’s Wine Bar, interior, Robin Boyd, 1961–63. 0.9 Pelican House (demolished), Robin Boyd, 1956–57. 0.10 View of ‘The First 200 Years’, exhibition fitout, Robin Boyd, 1968. 0.11 Section of ‘The First 200 Years’, exhibition fitout, Robin Boyd, 1968. 0.12 Plan, 1:400, Garage+Deck+Landscape, Kew, Melbourne, Baracco+Wright Architects, 2006. 0.13 Street view, Garage+Deck+Landscape, Baracco+Wright Architects, 2006. 0.14 Context Plan, 1:10000, Barrabool Farm, landscape design, Barrabool, Victoria, Baracco+Wright Architects, 2015. 0.15 Site Plan, 1:500, ex-farm buildings, Barrabool Farm, landscape and re-fit, Baracco+Wright Architects, 2015. 0.16 View of repurposed stables, Barrabool Farm, Baracco+Wright Architects, 2015. 0.17 View of veranda added to stables, Baracco+Wright Architects, 2015 0.18 Context plan, 1:5000, Rose House, Merricks Beach, Victoria, Baracco+Wright Architects, 2009. 0.19 View of scattered buildings, Rose House, Baracco+Wright Architects, 2009. 0.20 Floor plan, 1:400, Rose House, Baracco+Wright Architects, 2009. 0.21 View of separate volumes and deck, Rose House, Baracco+Wright Architects, 2009.

25 25 25 26 27 27 28 28 29 29 29 30 30 31 32 33 33 34 34 35 35

viii  Figures 0.22 Site conditions plan, 1:1000, top 2011, bottom 2013, Garden House, Westernport, Victoria, Baracco+Wright Architects, 2013–15. 0.23 Floor plan, 1:400, Garden House, Baracco+Wright Architects. 0.24 View, west façade, Garden House, Baracco+Wright Architects. 0.25 View of interior, Garden House, Baracco+Wright Architects.

36 36 37 37

Part 2 Note: Context plans are 1:10000 Site plans are 1:2000 Floor plans and sections are 1:400 unless otherwise noted All plans oriented north unless otherwise noted All drawings Baracco+Wright Architects 1.1 Exterior view from garden, 1947. 1.2 Context plan 1951 and original geomorphic conditions (left). 1.3 Site plan, 1951. 1.4 Long section, 1947. 1.5 Floor plan, 1947. 1.6 Aerial view from north east. 1.7 Long section, 1951. 1.8 Floor plan, 1951. 1.9 Interior view towards entry, 1947. 1.10 Pergola and outdoor area, 1947. 1.11 View of façade, 1947. 2.1 View from garden to main façade, 1952. 2.2 Context plan. 2.3 Site plan. 2.4 First floor plan. 2.5 Floor plan. 2.6 View from garden. 2.7 Short section. 2.8 North façade. 2.9 Current interior view towards north east dematerialised corner. 2.10 Current external view of single storey north façade. 2.11 View of north east corner, 1952. 2.12 Current view of volumes from north. 2.13 Current view of volumes from north east. 2.14 Current view of south east corner. 2.15 View of bridge, 1952. 3.1 Current view of double height volume. 3.2 Context plan. 3.3 Site plan.

57 60 60 60 60 61 61 61 62 62 63 65 68 68 68 68 69 69 69 70 70 70 70 70 71 71 73 76 76

Figures ix 3.4 First floor plan. 3.5 Ground floor plan. 3.6 View from east from garden.  3.7 Site section. 3.8 Long section. 3.9 Short section. 3.10 Current view of glazed link from southern courtyard. 3.11 Current view of glazed link and stair to study. 3.12 Current view of west façade. 3.13 Current view of living room through to glazed link. 3.14 Current view of double height volume from north. 4.1 View from garden to main façade, 1953. 4.2 Context plan. 4.3 Site plan. 4.4 Floor plan showing grid. 4.5 Floor plan. 4.6 View from north (road). 4.7 View from south. 4.8 Site section. 4.9 South west elevation. 4.10 Current view of south corner. 4.11 Current view of north east façade. 4.12 Current view of south west façade. 4.13 Current view from interior through south west façade. 5.1 View from east towards entry, 1954. 5.2 Context plan. 5.3 Site plan. 5.4 Floor plan. 5.5 View from north. 5.6 Short section. 5.7 Long section. 5.8 Current view of north wing, north façade. 5.9 Current view from north east. 5.10 Current view of north façade. 6.1 View from west, 1954. 6.2 Context plan. 6.3 Site plan. 6.4 Floor plan. 6.5 View from within courtyard. 6.6 Site section. 6.7 Short section. 6.8 Current view of walled courtyard from north. 6.9 Current view of interior. 6.10 Close up view of courtyard, 1954. 6.11 Current view of Half Moon Bay from headland. 6.12 Current view from interior of extending table.

76 76 77 77 77 77 78 78 78 79 79 81 84 84 84 84 85 85 85 85 86 86 87 87 89 92 92 92 93 93 93 94 94 95 97 100 100 100 101 101 101 102 102 102 103 103

x  Figures   7.1 View of building over creekbed undercroft, 1954.   7.2 Context plan.   7.3 Site plan.   7.4 Floor plan.   7.5 Ground plan.   7.6 View of undercroft area.   7.7 Long section.   7.8 Current view from interior.   7.9 Current view of undercroft.   7.10 View of entry, 1954.   7.11 View from north east, 1954.   7.12 View of entry, 1954.   8.1 View of internal courtyard, 1956.   8.2 Context plan.   8.3 Site plan.   8.4 Floor plan.   8.5 Aerial view showing roof and courtyard.   8.6 Site section.   8.7 Short section.   8.8 Current view from southern parkland.   8.9 Current view from west through roof.   8.10 Current view of floating eaves.   8.11 View of balcony, 1956.   8.12 Current view through detached roof.   9.1 View from river embankment, 1956.   9.2 Context plan.   9.3 Site plan.   9.4 First floor plan, 1956.   9.5 First floor plan, 1967.   9.6 Ground floor plan.   9.7 View of ground floor towards stairwell.   9.8 View of roof terrace.   9.9 Site section.   9.10 Short section.   9.11 Current view from roof terrace.   9.12 Current view from embankment.   9.13 View from north embankment, 1956. 10.1 View of fountains, 1960. 10.2 Context plan oriented east. 10.3 Site plan. 10.4 Aerial view from north. 10.5 Site section. 10.6 Long section. 10.7 View of fountains, 1960. 10.8 Aerial view of fountains from north, 1960. 10.9 Aerial view from south, 1960.

105 108 108 108 108 109 109 110 110 110 111 111 113 116 116 116 117 117 117 118 119 119 119 119 121 124 124 124 124 124 125 125 125 125 126 126 127 129 132 132 133 133 133 134 134 134

Figures xi 10.10 View of fountains, 1960. 10.11 View of fountains, 1960. 11.1 View from courtyard, 1958. 11.2 Context plan. 11.3 Site plan. 11.4 First floor plan. 11.5 Ground floor plan. 11.6 Aerial view from south west. 11.7 Façade elevation. 11.8 Long section. 11.9 View of south façade, 1958. 11.10 View from entry towards stair, 1958. 11.11 View from courtyard to rear volume, 1958. 11.12 View of ground floor living room, 1958. 11.13 View of façade, 1958. 12.1 View from courtyard towards house, 1959. 12.2 Context plan. 12.3 Site plan. 12.4 Floor plan. 12.5 Axonometric view from south east. 12.6 Short section. 12.7 Long section. 12.8 Interior view towards courtyard, 2003. 12.9 View of rear façade, 2003. 12.10 View of courtyard towards house, 1959. 13.1 Current view of street approach, uphill. 13.2 Context plan. 13.3 Site plan. 13.4 Floor plan. 13.5 View from north. 13.6 Short section. 13.7 Long section. 13.8 Current view from uphill to roof. 13.9 Current view of south façade. 13.10 Current view from living room towards balcony. 13.11 Current view from balcony. 13.12 Current view from south west. 14.1 View from Botanic Gardens, 1962. 14.2 Context plan. 14.3 Site plan. 14.4 Floor plan, 1:1000 typical. 14.5 Aerial view from north west. 14.6 Short section, 1:1000. 14.7 North elevation, 1:1000. 14.8 Current detail view of north façade. 14.9 View of façade from ground level, 1962.

135 135 137 140 140 140 140 141 141 141 142 142 143 143 143 145 148 148 148 149 149 149 150 150 151 153 156 156 156 157 157 157 158 158 158 159 159 161 164 164 164 165 165 165 166 166

xii  Figures 14.10 View from north east, 1962. 14.11 View from Domain Park Road, 1962. 14.12 View from Botanic Gardens, 1962. 15.1 Current view from south east of building embedded into slope. 15.2 Context plan. 15.3 Site plan. 15.4 Floor plan. 15.5 Ground plan. 15.6 View of internal hallway and related garden court. 15.7 Site section. 15.8 Short section. 15.9 Current view from north of double height volume. 15.10 Current view from balcony under north façade. 15.11 View from south through building showing continuous ceiling plane. 15.12 Current view of west façade. 16.1 Baker House, view of exterior through trees, 1966. 16.2 Baker ‘Dower’ House, current view of entry. 16.3 Baker House, view of exterior through trees, 1966. 16.4 Baker ‘Dower’ House, view of entry, 1968. 16.5 Context plan, combined. 16.6 Site plan, combined. 16.7 Site section, Baker House. 16.8 Section, Baker House. 16.9 Floor plan, Baker House. 16.10 Section, Baker ‘Dower’ House. 16.11 Floor plan, Baker ‘Dower’ House. 16.12 View of interior, Baker ‘Dower’ House. 16.13 View of façade, Baker House. 16.14 View of courtyard, Baker House. 16.15 Baker House, view from interior to central courtyard, 1966. 16.16 Baker House, view of exterior through trees, 1966. 16.17 Baker House, current view of central courtyard. 16.18 Baker House, view of living/dining room and central courtyard beyond, 1966. 16.19 Baker ‘Dower’ House, current view of interior. 16.20 Baker ‘Dower’ House, current view of interior. 16.21 Baker ‘Dower’ House, view from upslope, 1968. 16.22 Baker ‘Dower’ House, current view of interior. 16.23 Baker ‘Dower’ House, current view of north façade. 17.1 View of street façade, 1968. 17.2 Context plan. 17.3 Site plan. 17.4 Axonometric view from south east. 17.5 View from living room towards east. 17.6 Long section.

166 166 167 169 172 172 172 172 173 173 173 174 174 175 175 177 177 181 181 182 182 182 183 183 184 184 185 185 185 186 186 187 187 188 188 188 189 189 191 194 194 194 194 194

Figures xiii 17.7 Second floor plan. 17.8 First floor plan. 17.9 Ground floor plan. 17.10 Current detail view of north façade. 17.11 Current view of living room towards west. 17.12 Current view of bedroom towards north west. 17.13 Current view towards entry. 17.14 View of inner façade from central garden, 1968. 18.1 View of two façades from north, 1968. 18.2 Context plan. 18.3 Site plan. 18.4 Floor plan, 1:1000. 18.5 Aerial view from south east. 18.6 Long section, north east house. 18.7 Detail floor plan, north east house. 18.8 View of houses within shared garden, 1968. 18.9 View of garden hallway, 1968. 19.1 View of north façade, 1968. 19.2 Context plan. 19.3 Site plan. 19.4 Floor plan. 19.5 Axonometric view from south east. 19.6 View of courtyard. 19.7 Site section. 19.8 Section. 19.9 Current view from south east. 19.10 Current view of carport and entry to internal courtyard. 19.11 View of internal courtyard, 1968. 19.12 View of study and living room in the background, 1968. 20.1 Current view of south façade. 20.2 Context plan. 20.3 Site plan. 20.4 Floor plan. 20.5 View from south west. 20.6 Long section. 20.7 Site section. 20.8 First floor plan. 20.9 Second floor plan. 20.10 Current view of interior towards south. 20.11 View of interior from south east corner, 1969. 20.12 Bird’s-eye view from upper platform, 1969. 20.13 View from upper north slope, 1969. 20.14 View of interior towards south west, 1969. 20.15 Current view of interior towards south west. 20.16 Current view of upper platform. 21.1 Current view of north façade from downhill.

195 195 195 196 196 196 196 197 199 202 202 202 203 203 203 204 205 207 210 210 210 211 211 211 211 212 212 212 213 215 218 218 218 219 219 219 219 219 220 220 221 221 221 222 223 225

xiv  Figures 21.2 Context plan. 21.3 Site plan. 21.4 First floor plan. 21.5 Floor plan. 21.6 Axonometric view from north east. 21.7 Aerial view from north east. 21.8 Long section. 21.9 Current view of living room. 21.10 Current view of north façade. 21.11 Current view of street façade. 21.12 Current view of north façade from uphill.

228 228 228 228 229 229 229 230 230 230 231

Foreword

Baracco+Wright’s work on Robin Boyd, an Australian modernist who is little known – or almost completely unknown – in the old continent (also because he has been left out of the great architecture history manuals) emerges as a necessary book right from the first words in its introduction. It is much needed and not so much for the need to fill a historical vacuum – as its two writers themselves feel unsuited to this task – but rather because the work sets itself the twofold task of reflecting critically on Boyd’s work and at the same time on the authors’ own work. It is a discussion of design themes and architectural solutions which continually refers, in something resembling a play of mirrors, now to the work of the Australian modernist pioneer, now to the authors’ contemporaries. In such a dense and circular inter-relationship, it is sometimes ambiguous whether the starting point is the work of Boyd himself or that of the authors and the work aims to overcome the traditional dualism between theory and practice, practical and theoretical work. This is due above all to the fact that in a not too distant past architecture, historical and theoretical research made use of other operational approaches, typically ‘research by project’ and the so-called operational research also known as ‘operational criticism’ approach. Both these practices represent a crucial point in the relationship between a merely knowledge acquisition–based activity (research) and a purely operational one (project practice) (Groat and Wang 2002). This is true independent of the fact that the concept of operational research – connected to the use of history – found its theoretical formalisation in architecture in the context of Manfredo Tafuri’s thought, later in his Il progetto storico (Tafuri 1968), in which he finalises what he calls ‘operational criticism’ (de Solà-Morales 2001). By research/operational criticism is meant studies designed to further knowledge of work but whose purpose is also to legitimise a practice. The notion of critical research (in architecture) implies the creation of a fertile bond between theory and practice. And this in a context in which criticism means denoting specific considerations on the essential conditions and limitations of potential knowledge and taking practice into the void between project (as a mental, subjective process and a concrete one) and criticism (as an abstract, objective and detached process) (Grand 2008, 335).

xvi  Foreword From this perspective certain choices made by the authors in the structure of the book become clear, and in some ways also inevitable, starting from the substantial redrawing of their selection of Boyd’s work, an indispensable task only from the perspective of generating research which starts from the historical data but de facto a critical work designed also to define a theory supporting their own professional practice. For this reason, in the first part of the monograph, alongside drawings and photographs of Boyd’s work there are also photos of the work of Baracco+Wright Architects’ studio. This is in no way a clumsy attempt at endorsement but rather a frank critical discussion of their own work in the light of this Australian master. And it is precisely the similarities between Boyd’s and Baracco+Wright Architects’ approach which allow certain key spatial concepts to be elaborated which emerge from a comparative study of two such distant practices in time but so similar in design action terms. From a study of drawings, designs and visits to Boyd’s work a number of especially crucial spatial concepts to an understanding of his work emerge but also, and this is an operational discovery, reflect precisely on the work of the two authors as well. It is a matter of ‘spatial continuity’, ‘reciprocal co-belongingness’ and ‘openness’, to cite simply the most important, which Mauro Baracco and Louise Wright have distilled from an observation of the architect’s work but also from their own in a continuum and echoes which play on the idea of history as chronological, linear sequence of events separated by time. For the authors, as all practising architects know, history is synchrony because it is above all a tool: no linear sequence exists and work arranges itself according to an emotional map, a feelings and memories atlas (Bruno 2002) which transforms and transfigures real experiences to make them new material for a project every time. ‘Spatial continuity’, ‘reciprocal co-belongingness’ and ‘openness’ are thus the key features of a way of conceiving of architecture embodied sublimely by Boyd’s work, in his houses looking continually for a relationship with the outside world which goes beyond the view, the landscape frame, to establish the primacy of meaning over image, experiential over figurative and symbolic values. This is a pragmatism which is to be attributed to a certain culture which, even if we prefer to not define it anti-classical can at any rate be denominated a-classical in clear juxtaposition to that Greek classicism to which the whole of Western thought inappropriately owes such a profound debt. It is an approach which is frequently today often inappropriately traced to Calvinist thought, confusing cause and effect, as Calvinism was a consequence of a-classical thought and not the contrary. We could thus retrace in Boyd’s work – in a quasi ethno-anthropological research process – a great many features which reflect on a ‘way of being in the world’ whose origins lie precisely in the culture of the far north where the relationship between man and nature is typically profound and experiential in juxtaposition to the contemplative and reflective approach of the classical world. The northern world, like that of this Australian architect, is a world of meeting points and continuity and not of separation in which architectural elements seem to have dissolved almost physically into the landscape in which they are set, just as ‘reciprocally’ nature itself does not seem to stop at the

Foreword xvii architectural threshold contaminating its interiors and making categories such as interior-exterior both fleeting and imprecise. Mainly consisting of domestic residences, his architecture reveals the spirit animating it immediately and behind his abstract figuration there is a stylistic approach which is radically bound to the values of the residential culture that are typical of Australian tradition. A world away from taking on ‘styles’ or forms as ends in themselves, Boyd’s homes reflect these native characteristics recognised by traditional architecture scholars in full: adopting a necessity aesthetic which rejects sterile historicisms and sophisticated technologies in favour of common sense and straightforward solutions, the ability to materialise the landscape they are set into sub specie architectonica. His architecture thus emerges as ‘informed’ by its chosen location right from the design phase and possesses the rare ability to settle into it without contradicting its laws. By contrast it is precisely to these that the architect entrusts the delicate task of helping man to understand the landscape around him, rendering it more directly tangible. This is one of the most original and personal features of Boyd’s work, a patient search for indispensable and, at the same time, sustainable, form in which autochthonous values of impermanence are not simply not rejected but given an unusual and unexpected contemporary touch. This and a great deal else is what our two authors tell us with reference to the thought of Martin Heidegger, interweaving architectural tools and knowledge with an extra-disciplinary theoretical baggage, namely philosophy, in accordance with a typically Critical Studies approach (Belsey 1980). Baracco+Wright make use of Heidegger to offer theoretical foundations to the idea of overcoming the dialectic between subject and object, landscape and man, interior and exterior (to move the focus to an exquisitely architectural sphere) which they apply to both Boyd’s work and their own. Gennaro Postiglione

References Belsey, C., Critical Practice, Methuen & Co, London, 1980 Bruno, G., Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film, Verso, New York, 2002 De Sola-Morales, I., Pratiche teoriche, pratiche storiche, pratiche architettoniche, in Decifrare l’architettura, Allemandi, Torino, 2001, pp. 145–57 Grand, S., ‘Theory’, in M. Erlhoff; T. Marshall (eds.), Design Dictionary, Birkhäuser, Basilea, 2008, pp. 379–80 Groat, L., Wang, D., Architectural Research Methods, J. Wiley & Sons, New York, 2002 Tafuri, M., Teoria e Storia dell’architettura, Laterza, Bari, 1968

Acknowledgements

This book begun as a postdoctorate thesis with the encouragement and help of many people throughout the years. The following people were involved in research and production of the originating PhD thesis on Robin Boyd’s work and thought by Mauro Baracco, 2010: Sophie Cleland, Peter Badger, Vasilios Barakia, Lucas Lau, William Kong, Ka Voh Chan, Julianne Nee, Annette Rubach, Louisa MacLeod, Andrey Soebekti, Lauren Kruger, William Corner, Stephanie Burrows, Julian Canterbury, Rodney Eggleston, Costas Gabriel, Yong Chen Goh, Chi Sun Goh, Ming Jun Lee, Howard Mok, Amanda Moore, Ken Ng, Ben Baird, Didier Chi Li Mow, Brendan Dawson, Mohd Hussin, Michael Christensen, Will Chan, Charity Edwards, Murray Barker, Cassie Ng, Teik Rong, Monique Brady, Giulio Lazzaro, Nina Dubovitz, Tamara Friebel, Megan White, Penelope Webster, Ben Akerman and the invaluable Oliver Hutchinson. We wish to thank the late Mark Strizic, who very generously opened his archive and home to us, and Dianna Gold, who was very generous with the copyright permission of his archive; the State Library of Victoria for the reproduction of photographs by Peter Wille that are part of the Pictures Collection, and the patient staff of the Australian Manuscripts Collection of the State Library of Victoria. Many thanks also go to Aaron Pocock, and the close empathy that is relevantly expressed by his more recent photographs of some of Boyd’s works. We would like to warmly thank the following people for allowing to visit their houses and for sharing thoughts and stories related specifically to them, and generally to Boyd’s work: the director of the Robin Boyd Foundation Tony Lee, the former director of the Manning Clark House organisation for contemporary debate and discussion, Penny Ramsay, Penleigh Boyd, Tim Hegarty, Lucinda McLean, Jen Aughterson, Maria Rajendran and Reg Rippon, the late Inge and Grahame King, Martin and Diana Young, the Dawes family, Frank (who passed away in November 2010) and Marylin Fenner, Maggie Edmond, Emma Forbes, Isabel Roberts, Julie Bryson, Janys Lloyd, Helen Clemson, Jason Alexander, Simon Watson, Gordon Sanson and Jenny Read, Ann Arnold, Michael Baker, Nic Dowse and Natalie Toohey, Peter Mitrakas, Mary Featherston, Julian Scanlan, and Heather and Jack Le Griffon.

xx  Acknowledgements We wish to thank Shane Murray and Leon van Schaik for some initial precious discussions and advice; Francesco Tomatis for his inspiring philosophical views on Zen and existentialism in the many conversations we had throughout the years; Sarah Whiting, Hilde Heynen and Teresa Stoppani for the constructive feedback received in occasion of their visit to RMIT; Jeff Malpas for his critical advice in regard to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger; Peter Corrigan, Mary Featherston, Doug Evans and Conrad Hamann for their continuous encouragement and crucial suggestions; Peter Downton for his invaluable guidance and sharp sense of judgment; and Catherine Horwill and Jonathan Ware for their silent persistence. We are immensely grateful to Catherine Murphy for her strong unfading encouragement; for her precious advice in regard to the writing and editing of the texts; and for the rigour, but also the exquisite sense of irony that she consistently shared with us. This book has been supported by RMIT School of Architecture and Design through the SRC (School Research Committee) Funds.

Introduction

This book discusses the work of Australian architect Robin Boyd (1919–71) through a Heideggerian philosophy of spatial continuity and extends the discussion by tracing a trajectory in the lineage of Boyd of a possible contemporary direction for architecture to be linked more closely with the ecology of its situations. The second half of the book presents 22 of Robin Boyd’s projects as a collection that demonstrate the concept of spatial continuity. Boyd’s projects have never been publicly shown with this level of comprehensiveness. Each project is entirely re-documented in its site and presented through detailed drawings, archival and new photographs. This type of interpretation is an alternative one in comparison to the existing material about Robin Boyd and his work. Robin Boyd has a large body of work that has been documented and discussed in Australia – although many works are still being ‘discovered’. Previous books and essays by various contributors – Geoffrey Serle, David Saunders, Zelman Cowen, Conrad Hamann, Harriet Edquist, Karen Burns, Philip Goad, Winsome Callister, Doug Evans and Helen Stuckey,1 among others, have generally read and placed Boyd’s approach and works in relation to historical and cultural events that occurred throughout and parallel to his life and architectural career. More generally, this framework also contributes to the development of an architectural theory beyond stylistic, aesthetic, cultural and social reasons of their own specific time. The philosophy of Heidegger has often been applied by other architectural theorists most commonly due to the parallel concern of spatial understanding. Beyond more direct architectural parallels, Heideggerian philosophy could be described as open-ended and paradoxical: a state of wondering. While we were initially drawn to Robin Boyd’s architecture for its formal qualities, peculiarities of his body of work invited reflection along Heideggerian lines. Boyd’s work could be considered contradictory2 and has been described as without a recognisable style.3 This quality, pervaded by a sense of ‘wondering’ and openness that is also reflected in Boyd’s writing, is argued here as Heideggerian in nature, and characteristic of a ‘poetic’ approach that is continuously inquisitive in relation to our existence and experience of the world, and therefore

xxii  Introduction alternative to the sense of assertion that typically informs modes and outcomes of mainstream modernist positions. The late works of the German philosopher encourage a cognitive approach that is paradoxically and illogically open – “released”, in Heideggerian terms – to embrace both rationality and irrationality. Through the simultaneous use of both “calculative” and “meditative” thinking, it would be possible to say ‘yes’ and at the same time ‘no’ to technology, and ultimately “dwell in the world in a totally different way”.4 The sense of ambivalence and indefiniteness that in different and various ways characterises both the writings and the built works of the Melbourne architect is considered closely analogous to – an indirect and unintentional reflection of – the paradoxical coexistence of rationality and irrationality that informs Heidegger’s thought. Critical of the ‘sense of certainty’ that accompanies many formulaic theories in the context of modernism, the approach of both Heidegger and Boyd, in their respective fields of philosophy and architecture, is informed by an inclination to embrace rationality and irrationality, “calculative” and “meditative” thinking, exposure to both comprehension and incomprehension. Boyd’s approach, unconsciously in empathy with Heidegger’s philosophical thought, is alternative and peripheral in regards to those of mainstream modernism, which the Melbourne architect embraces, absorbs and overcomes through a non-reactionary but undoubtedly sound process of critical resistance. Boyd’s approach to both theoretical discussion (widely undertaken throughout his innumerable published works) and design production (inclusive of an extensive body of built and unbuilt projects) resists the rational determinations of mainstream modernism. This coexistence of rational thinking and irrational sense of hope/releasement is the peculiar characteristic of this architect, and places him on the edges of the modernist culture and its related values. The second part of this book documents and discusses 22 selected projects, selected in order to show an array of works over differing scales and programs that reflect the arguments put forward here. Each project is entirely re-documented through new drawings as well as illustrated with archive and recent photographs, and discussed through an individual text that is descriptive and theoretical at once. The projects of this section are explored as related, both directly and indirectly, to Boyd’s theoretical approach and the various correlated speculations discussed throughout the main theoretical essay; some recurrent conditions of these projects – spatial continuity; reciprocal cobelongingness between architecture and landscape; and coexistence and mutual intertwinement of functional areas, among others – are proposed as reflections of the sense of ambivalence and potentiality that inform Boyd’s theoretical approach. The re-documentation of these projects through the systematic production of types of drawing that range from territorial to urban, architectural and landscape scales and definitions is a deliberate strategy to test these works as theoretically and physically informed by conditions of spatial continuity and co-belongingness of parts.

Introduction xxiii This last paragraph introduces a trajectory that we trace through the essay and projects through the notion of co-belongingness of the built and natural environment, an outcome of spatial continuity, or, equal value placed on the inside/outside in the overall and reciprocal combination and definition of space. It is proposed that a contemporary direction for architecture in the lineage of Boyd would more closely link architecture to the ecologies of their situations and in turn effect their strategies, siting and forms among others. We discuss this proposal through some of our own projects in our practice, Baracco+Wright Architects.

Notes 1 See, among others: Geoffrey Serle, Robin Boyd: A Life, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1995. David Saunders, ‘Afterword’, in Robin Boyd (ed.), Living in Australia, Pergamon Press, Sydney, 1970, pp. 147–152. David Saunders, ‘Retrospective – Robin Boyd’, in Architecture in Australia, vol. 61, no. 1, February 1972, pp. 90–98. Zelman Cowen, ‘Homage to Robin Boyd’, in Architecture in Australia, vol. 62, no. 2, April 1973. Conrad Hamann, Modern Architecture in Melbourne: The Architecture of Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, 1927–1971, PhD thesis, Visual Art Department, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, July 1978. Conrad Hamann, Chris Hamann, ‘Anger and the New Order: Some Aspects of Robin Boyd’s Career’, Transition, vol. 2, no. 3/4, 1981. Conrad Hamann, ‘Against the Dying of the Light: Robin Boyd and Australian Architecture’, in Transition, no. 29, 1989. Karen Burns, Harriet Edquist (eds.), Robin Boyd: The Architect as Critic, Transition Publishing, Melbourne, 1989. Philip Goad, ‘Pamphlets at the Frontier: Robin Boyd and the Will to Incite an Australian Architectural Culture’, in Karen Burns, Harriet Edquist (eds.), Robin Boyd: The Architect as Critic; Harriet Edquist (ed.), ‘Robin Boyd’, Transition, no. 38, 1992, monographic issue on Robin Boyd including, among others, the following contributions: Conrad Hamann, ‘Envoie 1962–71’; Philip Goad, ‘Robin Boyd and the Design of the House, 1959–1971 – New Eclecticism: Ethic and Aesthetic’; Winsome Callister, ‘The Dialectic of Desire and Disappointment: Robin Boyd and Australian Architecture’. Doug Evans, Indistinct: Pierre Bourdieu and the Field of Architectural Production, PhD thesis, School of Architecture and Design, RMIT University, 2002. Helen Stuckey, ‘Robin Boyd and the Revolt against Suburbia’, Imaginary Australia, B Architectural Magazine, no. 52/53, 1995/96. 2 See Hamann, ‘Against the Dying of the Light’. 3 See Saunders, ‘Afterword’. 4 Martin Heidegger, ‘Memorial Address’, in Discourse on Thinking (originally published by Verlag Günther Neske, Pfullingen, under the title of Gelassenheit, 1959), Harper & Row Publishers, New York, 1966, pp. 46, 54, 55.

Part I

Robin Boyd Spatial continuity

1 Robin Boyd: spatial continuity

Tim Winton observes that two centuries after . . . (the Aboriginal people’s) way of living was disrupted forever, Australia is still a place where there is more landscape than culture. Our island resists the levels of containment and permanent physical presence that prevail on most other continents. It probably always will.1 This is something that Robin Boyd, in spite of the dilemma this poses to his profession, seems to have deeply understood. Many of his buildings are an attempt to come at or sort of dance around this dilemma. A pioneer of this approach, he convincingly demonstrated a trajectory of how we might build in such a place and shifted architecture in Australia away from the discrete object towards buildings that knit with their physical place. We often think of his buildings as hats.2 The ground plane carries through, sometimes literally, and the roof, or hat, compresses the vast space and sky. The vast space and sky are what we are concentrating on when we use the word ‘landscape’ and apply this notion to some specific conditions of Australia. The more comprehensive term ‘open space’ is also – and to some degree even more – appropriate in order to express openness as a spatial condition that through Boyd’s design approach is closely integrated, so it is argued in this book, to built forms and volumes. The term ‘open landscape’ (more than ‘natural landscape’) is also a further connotation that can be used to describe the condition of outdoor space – often extensive and related to urban and suburban situations – which is in continuity with the indoor and built space of Boyd’s projects. The vast space and sky are present in these works as integrated spatial elements, registered against the usually unaltered ground plane, technically and conventionally outside of the inside, and yet subliminally, cogently merged in a continuum with the indoor space. Sometimes the surrounding landscape is more relevantly part of the continuum; sometimes, when exaggeratedly overwhelming, there is less of it. Its integrated presence is however always part of Boyd’s designed space; it is something that especially in Australia cannot be separated from people’s psyche and their built environment. The use of the term landscape as described earlier seems ironic, being not of the land itself; but in the landscapes of Australia, which vary considerably, the

4  Robin Boyd: spatial continuity vast space and sky is the consistent quality and perhaps what, to use Winton’s term, is most resistant to containment. The suburban landscapes of many of the buildings shown here, most of which would have been cheek by jowl with remnant bushland, had and still have this quality. The term landscape conjures an overall aesthetic, a visual quality. While this is true of its use here, it’s more than that. It’s also a sense of spatial quality, which is hard to pin down in terms of specific physical features. It is also used to mean the natural ecosystem of some of the places. This last definition is given more weight when we consider Boyd’s lineage and how we might work today. This trajectory developed by Boyd is discussed here through three lines of enquiry in Part 1 of this book: • • •

Through Boyd’s thought and design approach; Through the lens of Heideggerian philosophy concerning notions of space; Through the tracing of this trajectory towards an approach for contemporary architecture discussed through examples of our own design works.

The first two lines of enquiry are further explored in Part 2, where 22 projects are presented in detail. The physical and visual connection with the surrounding landscape, the response to ground plane and the exploration of the horizontal compression of space through the roof form open Boyd’s buildings to their situations, inducing spatial continuity – a term that is used here literally but also philosophically. As a brief aside, we must distance our argument from the current overuse of the lifestyle term ‘indoor outdoor’ to describe buildings that physically connect to their immediate exterior, usually a living space opening to an outdoor entertaining area by means of large or bi-folding doors and windows. The linking of interior and exterior we will go on to describe, involves complex relationships of dematerialisation, spatial compression and releasement, a strong use of the overhead plane (ceiling/roof), plan and sectional relationships that serve to link space and specific responses to each individual site. The term ‘spatial continuity’ is developed from a philosophical perspective. When one mode of thinking is applied to another – philosophical to architectural, in this specific case – an increased ability to uncover or shift how something is perceived and therefore developed occurs. Notions of architecture and its relationship with space, containment, openness and landscape are explored here through the philosophy of Martin Heidegger concerning questions of relativity in relation to subject and object – typically perceived as two separate terms of a dichotomy – and time and space – conventionally conceived as absolute and finite dimensions. This investigative process draws out possible trajectories, following on from Boyd’s work, that point to a design approach with the potential to further articulate strategies (that could develop) in accordance to a broad yet deep understanding with landscape and its physicality and science and relationships therein, rather than an emphasis on the object.

Robin Boyd: spatial continuity 5 We trace the trajectory of spatial continuity to propose a contemporary position that could develop, linking ecology and architecture as an outcome of a deepening understanding of ‘landscape’ and how we can act as architects, where the remnants of pre-settlement ecologies – and sometimes much more than remnants – reveal themselves constantly; and here we are thinking of Australia in particular. Robin Boyd Robin Boyd was a multidisciplinary architect. He consistently championed architecture and promoted a discourse around relationships between design, cultural and social issues. His diverse and prolific activity ranged from design practice to engagement with the Australian Institute of Architects and other organisations, extensive publication of books, magazine reviews and newspaper articles, television programs, international travelling, public lectures and more occasional involvement with academic institutions.3 He was born in 1919, and unexpectedly died on 16 October 1971 at the age of 52, as a result of a stroke suffered while coming out of the anaesthetic received for a minor surgery. He lived in Melbourne, Australia, and primarily worked there, initially in the office Boyd, Petheridge & Bell from 1945 to 1947, by himself for some years after this, then from 1953 as an associate director of Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, and then from 1962, when Roy Grounds left to continue as a sole practitioner, at Romberg and Boyd. The work shown in the second part of the book spans these times. The question of authorship was explored in the originating PhD,4 and it has been established that the directors generally worked independently, and that these works can be attributed to Boyd (as designer). Melbourne is typical of an Australian metropolitan city, with a small centre and a large low rise predominantly suburban surrounding that can stretch for tens of kilometres. From the late 1940s–60s, the period of many of his works, the locations of most of his houses would have been quite peripheral and quite possibly in previously undeveloped bush. This condition was typical of new housing – a condition that can still be found today – and meant that the presence of the landscape was difficult to ignore. Boyd’s interest in landscape, indigenous vegetation and the existing qualities of places in general prompted him to study analogous cases in the world similarly informed by design responses that are primarily engaged with local cultural and geographical conditions. Works of the second post-war period, from Scandinavian Empiricism, British Brutalism, Japanese Metabolism and Italian Neo-realism, among others, are reviewed and praised by Boyd as late modernist shifts from modernist ‘internationalist’ agendas that are very often hindered through their idealistic pursuit of abstraction and geometrical composition of forms.5 Although never a canonical regionalist, Boyd’s interests for these forms of “deviation” from mainstream internationalism6 reveal his affinity with cultures and sensibilities that are in touch with the history, geography

6  Robin Boyd: spatial continuity and culture of their places – his support of the Smithsons, particularly for some of their later work more explicitly engaged with the existing conditions of their place,7 is a reflection of Boyd’s ability to conceive architectural interventions in relationship with their urban and territorial contexts. This is evident through his extensive body of work, the majority of which consists of residential houses. His critique of ‘featurism’8 as a tendency – still in full swing today – to the production of buildings that are exaggeratedly filled up with many gratuitous motives, colours, shapes and things in general, is a clear indication of his belief in architectures capable of establishing relevant dialogues with their urban contexts rather than to be attracted by the allure of selfreferential formal celebration. The elevated ‘back-yards in the air’ in the unbuilt project for the Carnich Towers (Fig 0.1), provide private and yet communal open space in continuity with both the public space of the Botanic Gardens immediately across the road and the compact density of urban spaces throughout the city in the background. Similarly, the horizontally compressed residential spaces of the Domain Park (Fig 0.2, Fig 0.3) flats extrude their inhabitants into continuous engagement with the space of the parklands nearby, the bay a little further away and the urban continuum as a whole. These two examples of spatial continuity, played out here at a multi-residential typology scale, can be experienced in other different types of work: from the diagrammatic reductions of civic and commercial projects in relation to their surrounding landscape – the horizontality of Southgate Fountain’s disks (Fig 0.4) in continuity with that of the adjacent river, comes immediately to mind, but also the compressed space under the roof of John Batman’s Motor Inn (Fig 0.5, Fig 0.6), and the sense of uninterruptedness over the façade and through the interior space of Jimmy Watson’s Wine Bar (Fig 0.7, Fig 0.8) – to the unleashing into landscape of his single-family houses liberated from being typically expected to provide separation and safety from the outside – both his own houses, Pelican House (Fig 0.9), Featherston House, Farfor Houses, McClune House, Hegarty House, are only some of the many examples informed by this trait – to interior projects and fit-out installations that wittily dissolve separations between parts – the ‘First 200 Years’ exhibition (Fig 0.10 and Fig 0.11) and the Australian pavilions at both 1967 Montreal and 1970 Osaka international expos are convincing interplays between pre-given architectural containers, newly introduced design and furniture devices, and the various items on display. Since his early book Australia’s Home, Boyd recommended consideration of the regional idioms conveyed by different Australian houses as an immediate translation of their response to specific environmental and climatic local conditions rather than the expression of predetermined aesthetic intentions.9 In the same book, Boyd also praises some alternative investigations towards integration of domestic spaces. Taking a distance from the rigidness of both 19th century planning and following modernist prescriptive manifestos for open planning at any cost, he warmly supports experimental projects that are not surprisingly in close empathy with his own investigations for spatial layouts to accommodate integrated activities.10

Robin Boyd: spatial continuity 7 Later in his career, in a contribution for a book published in the same year of his death, Boyd once again praises the notions of (in our terms) continuity, openness and reciprocal co-belongingness of spaces and activities. Applied on this occasion to discussions concerned with urban planning and residential design, in particular to topics focussed to social and spatial integration, his observations call for urban density and mix of programs and typologies, reiterating concepts that are continuously supported through all his writings and projects: The needs are now fairly well and fairly generally recognised, at least among those who are professionally concerned with housing. The first and most important one is to break down the barriers: the barriers between dwelling types which indirectly create barriers between different social classes. The second is to end the cotton-wool protection of the residential zones, the arbitrary isolation which forbids entrance to anything not looking like another brick veneer villa.11 As we know, the points championed by Boyd – urban density, mixed-use, social combination and integration of built and open space – are some of the key ingredients currently advocated for the creation of resilient and sustainable cities facing climate and social/demographic change. Boyd’s visionary approach, well ahead of his time, puts forward strategies in many ways informed by a deep sense of care for a world that has been increasingly severely consumed in the name of progressive modern agendas. Not by coincidence, we believe, his calls are voiced in and for a country where the natural environment has been rapidly – and tragically – devastated by Western development in favour of intense urban sprawl; some dramatic figures, more specifically in relation to Victoria, have been conveyed by environment policy researcher and academic Geoff Wescott: more than half (56 per cent) of Australian’s riparian vegetation has disappeared. When we turn to the most densely populated and most cleared state, Victoria, some figures are simply shocking. Overall, more than 70 per cent of Victoria’s native vegetation has been cleared since European settlement.12 Not by coincidence either, the notion of ‘care’ is commonly identified and discussed as an essential point related to Heidegger’s philosophy, with particular regard to the fields of earth and environmental conservation. Many contemporary philosophers and theoreticians have highlighted significant degrees of empathy between Heidegger’s critique of the objectifying nature of Western thought, and sensibilities that inherently pervade Eastern thinking, including Zen Buddhism and Daoism among others. The approach of the German philosopher, driven by constant investigation of the sense of relativity applied to time and space, goes hand in hand with issues regarding nature, ecology, environmental ethics and the sustainable use of, and engagement with, the land.13

8  Robin Boyd: spatial continuity The Heideggerian theoretical framework applied through this book – an interpretation of Boyd’s work and thought not by canonical historians, but practising architects and academics involved with design-led research – enables a locating of the work of this architect beyond specific chronological facts and all potential relationships with stylistic or aesthetic reasons that are normally associated to specific historical circumstances. The extreme contemporaneousness of Boyd’s approach is clearly expressed by his explorations for cities and architectures that care for their open environments, ecosystems and local landscapes. The design outcomes are therefore a reaction, a response, to the specific space and landscape of each particular situation, never really the application of some pre-determined or intended forms. The ‘lack of a recognisable style’, introduced as a defining character identified by academic and architect David Saunders in regards to Boyd’s work, is not surprisingly associated to the lack of a “memorable image”: it is not characteristic of Boyd’s work to have recognisable forms being repeated. . . . The memorable image is not usually the point about a Boyd design, and where it has emerged it is not a matter of arbitrary form making. . . . There is no dominant Boyd style, but there is a discernible consistency of approach, which leans on the view that each occasion will be in some way unique, and likely to produce a fresh result.14 The lack of memorable, heroic images are not only a reflection of Boyd’s uninterest in the creation of self-referential forms, very often generated as representations of pre-determined ideas disengaged from the site’s physical context, but also a further confirmation of the sense of openness and evasiveness of this architect as his way to stay ‘released’ towards the pressure of innovation imposed by modern agendas. Resisting modernism’s pervasive demand to create an innovative and original architecture15 – that is, an architecture clearly identifiable with an innovative and original style, even better if recognisable as an ‘original signature’ – Boyd is not afraid to be unclear, elusive, ambiguous and never definitive in both his writings and design works. He is not concerned by his way of making arguments that remain inconclusive, or by producing architectures with no recognisable forms – architectures that are every time different as differently conditioned by the pre-given data of each site and situation. It is also this quality that directs us to consider Boyd’s work through a Heideggerian philosophy, so as to contemplate from a different perspective, and beyond a purely historical position, an approach and resulting architecture that develops a spatial continuity somewhat dissolving subject and object and in so doing shifts man as the relational centre and points the architectural profession towards a development in its approach to landscape. The term ‘con-fusion’ in particular, spelt out with a hyphen (-) to link and yet separate the terms ‘con’ and ‘fusion’, intends to highlight the notion of ‘fusion’ as a process inclined to inseparable forms of integration between

Robin Boyd: spatial continuity 9 entities, thus also instigate reflection on the implausibility – and irrelevance as well – of the act that determines individual and self-referential types of ‘truth’ in isolation. Heideggerian perspectives It is the shifting of man as the relational centre that opens the way to a different approach in Boyd’s architecture. Whether fully intentional, the architecture nonetheless embodies this shift. Beyond more direct architectural parallels, Heideggerian philosophy could be described as open-ended and paradoxical: a state of wondering. This is also and primarily the reflection of this philosopher’s critical resistance towards a pervasive modernist approach that tends to conceive and perceive reality as if it was merely consisting of objective and individual physical presences. This modernist approach, extensively diffused in modern and contemporary architecture, is a direct reflection of both: •

A typical Western tradition of thought that is originally, since ever, inclined to identify being with presence;16 • The Western modern creation and gradual amplification of the duality between subject and object, according to which reality and the world are perceived and represented as objective products of a cognitive process in which human beings are indeed the subjects, constantly considering themselves as “the relational center of that which is as such”.17

Robin Boyd’s manifold activity was in full swing and development over the two decades of the 1950s and ’60s while Martin Heidegger was producing the relevant works of his second and last phase, following and carrying out the shift of his thought that is arguably marked by his Letter on Humanism, written in 1946 and published one year later.18 Heidegger died in 1976, five years after the Melbourne architect. Although the two lived in the same period – the philosopher twenty years older than the architect – no claim is made here in order to suggest that Boyd may have been exposed to Heidegger’s theories. His bibliographic references19 are hardly involved with the field of philosophy, and there is no evidence that he read or discussed any work by the German philosopher. In addition to this, many of Heidegger’s writings, especially the late ones produced after the Second World War which constitute an essential philosophical background to the arguments put forward in this book, were translated into English only after Boyd’s death in 1971. Furthermore, more recent reinterpretations of Heidegger’s thought – those by contemporary Italian philosopher Massimo Cacciari are particularly relevant to the argument of this book20 – have been published well after Boyd’s death. In ‘The Age of the World Picture’, Heidegger extensively discusses the modern inclination “to picture” the world as an objective representation that is

10  Robin Boyd: spatial continuity always determined in relation and accordance to the man as “subject” and “relational center” of everything: Certainly the modern age has, as a consequence of the liberation of the man, introduced subjectivism and individualism. But it remains just as certain that no age before this one has produced a comparable objectivism. . . . What is decisive is not that man frees himself to himself from previous obligations, but that the very essence of man itself changes, in that man becomes subject. . . . However, when man becomes the primary and only real subiectum, that means: Man becomes that being upon which all that is, is grounded as regards the manner of its Being and its truth. Man becomes the relational center of that which is as such. . . . What is, in its entirety, is now taken in such a way that it first is in being and only is in being to the extent that it is set up by man, who represents and sets forth. . . . In distinction from Greek apprehending, modern representing, whose meaning the word repraesentatio first brings to its earliest expression, intends something quite different. Here to represent [vor-stellen] means to bring what is present at hand [das Vorhandene] before oneself as something standing over against, to relate it to oneself, to the one representing it, and to force it back into this relationship to oneself as the normative realm. Wherever this happens, man “gets into the picture” in precedence over whatever is. But in that man puts himself into the picture in this way, he puts himself into the scene, i.e., into the open sphere of that which is generally and publicly represented. Therewith man sets himself up as the setting in which whatever is must henceforth set itself forth, must present itself [sich . . . präsentieren], i.e., be picture. Man becomes the representative [der Repräsentant] of that which is, in the sense of that which has the character of object. . . . Man makes depend upon himself the way in which he must take his stand in relation to whatever is as the objective. There begins that way of being human which mans the realm of human capability as a domain given over to measuring and executing, for the purpose of gaining mastery over that which is as a whole.21 In order to mitigate this modern overemphasis for rational representation, Heidegger’s philosophy proposes to engage with irrationality through a “meditative thinking” as a coexisting and parallel sensibility of the “calculative thinking” that predominantly informs rational and logical viewpoints.22 The state of wondering theorised by Heidegger is a paradoxical thinking that embraces at once rationality and irrationality, accepting both – and consistently calling for the coexistence of – these conditions as intrinsic of our being-in-the-world. It is also not surprising that Boyd’s writings have been described through a term – “inclusive”23 – that implies a sense of pluralism, contradiction, indeed ‘con-fusion’; the lack of a recognisable style discussed earlier as an essential trait of his work24 is closely related to the sense of inclusion and pluralism of this architect. Boyd’s ‘con-fusion’ is the reflection of an ability to rationally

Robin Boyd: spatial continuity 11 accept a comprehensible objectification of the world, and yet at the same time to hope for an incomprehensible dimension of reciprocal co-belongingness of physical and spatial entities. The Heideggerian sensibility of this architect – which makes him essentially alternative from the majority of other modernist and late modernist trends – on the one hand accepts, evidenced in the designs, the inevitability of metaphysical and unquestionable processes that make our logos determine the world as a combination/accord of interrelated singular things/parts/beings; on the other, however, is critical of any forms of relationship between things/parts/beings that are conventionally and rationally validated by the subject-object duality or by the assumption that consciousness and presence are the only, mere criteria for the truth.25 Boyd’s sense of ‘confusion’ and related notions in regards to his work and thought – spatial continuity above all, but also indeterminateness, openness and potentiality among others, some of these more directly discussed in the projects’ reviews later in this book – are a reflection of his critique towards relational processes that are conventionally guided by our logos to assert univocal truths, typically in the form of correlative interrelations. Although consisting of elements that are rationally perceivable as individual objective entities ‘logically interrelated’26 between each other, at the same time Boyd’s projects essentially call for, and participate in, an indivisible dimension of spatial continuum. Inclined to integration between architecture and landscape, as well as drawn beyond their architectural boundaries by their urban and territorial breadth, they intuitively reflect on, rather than rationally explain,27 the sense of spatial and conceptual ‘con-fusion’ that essentially, inexplicably, informs the dimension of spatial continuity between ‘built volumes’ and ‘unbuilt voids’, ‘architectural objects’ and ‘empty spaces’, ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, ‘foreground’ and ‘background’, ‘here’ and ‘there’, ‘up’ and ‘down’, and all other forms of spatial duality which are conventionally conceived as such merely in rational terms. Boyd’s suspicion for these validated dualities echoes Heidegger’s critique of ‘picturing the world’ as a strategy to come to terms with its inexplicability. In the attempt to overcome a complex, uneasy sense of anguish we dispose ourselves, due to our incapability to rationally comprehend the reasons of our Da-sein/being-in-the-world,28 to determine entities in the form of objects that are reassuringly ‘measured’, thus comprehended, by us through a rationally and logically driven process that makes us elect ourselves as relational subjects in every single form of understanding and definition of reality. Although this rational and logical process of comprehension is implicit in us as creatures originally equipped with rationality and sense of logic, on the other hand from modernity onwards, so Heidegger argues, this process has been exaggeratedly amplified in the name, and promotion, of an idea of ‘progress’ that has been consistently associated to technological development.29 However, equally implicit and original in us there is a coexisting sense of irrational and illogical intuition, open to an anguished realisation that a dimension of ‘oneness’, of ‘all-inclusiveness of everything’ in time and space, may be the essential condition of our ‘being-in-the-world’ and yet at the same time is rationally incomprehensible to us. Heidegger, and after him some contemporary

12  Robin Boyd: spatial continuity philosophers reinterpreting his thought, suggest that an appropriate, balanced, ‘poetic’ way to relate to the world, differently from modern/ist prioritisations of rationality over irrationality, is to embrace both – what Heidegger calls: ‘calculative’ and ‘meditative’ thinking. By exercising both at the same time we can be wondering, ‘poetically’ inquisitive in regards to the world, and positively engaging with the original uneasiness for not being able to explain, nor to measure our being-in-the-world. Not only is meditative thinking deeply rooted into thoughtful speculations of everyday reality, thus does not require any special condition, but it is also a practice that in encouraging openness to complexity rather than simplistic “one-sided” determinations allows us to be critical about certainties conventionally implied in logical determinations. Intrinsically implied with meditative thinking, “releasement toward things” and “openness to the mystery” instigate an approach to technology through wondering about it rather than blindly believing in it – these conditions “grant us the possibility of dwelling in the world in a totally different way”.30 Differently from many of his modernist peers seduced by the allures of technology associated to the ideals and aesthetics of ‘machine architecture’, Boyd is capable to stay released – to say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ – to it. For him technology is a means rather than an end. This is clearly visible in some of the simple, somehow ‘crude’, technological details of his buildings,31 but also expressed in some of his writings on the relationship between technology and architecture, where he underlines the danger of self-conscious forms of technological “delight” in new trends of engineering driven projects: The problem is how to control the irresponsible gymnastics and to restrict the galloping new movement to genuine poetry. Firstly, the engineering of excitement must practise relevance and curb its somewhat disconcerting propensity to appear to fly no matter what the occasion. Secondly, the audience has to be trained to see the line which divides any sincere expression from the displays and advertisements, and to keep raising the line another peg. Then the engineers of excitement will lose their self-consciousness. At present many of them are inclined to the old architectural failing of seeking simultaneously commodity, firmness and delight; and delight is so elusive when hotly pursued.32 As a means, technology can provide a sense of flexibility and potentiality – these are the qualities that make technology interesting to Boyd rather than its self-referential ‘exciting’ form. As clearly and enthusiastically realised by the Melbourne architect, flexibility and potentiality enable architectures to stay in a dimension of openness and ‘incomplete’ continuity, inclined to accommodate further changes and modifications, either instigated by the existing context and its continuous variations or rising from different and alternative ways of using and experiencing the spaces originally designed. Potentiality and flexibility are the conditions of formally unassertive and non-peremptory projects that, either as the outcome of Boyd’s own design or the object of his positive reviews, are

Robin Boyd: spatial continuity 13 consistently informed by a state of relativeness in the name of which boundaries between interior and exterior, landscape and built-scape, and other types of dualities conventionally based on forms of reciprocal opposition tend to ambiguously weaken and blur into each other. In a review of the German Pavilion designed by Frei Otto for the 1967 Montreal International Expo, Boyd praises the experimental technological solutions applied to this tensile structure not only in light of their appropriateness in addressing the impermanence of the event, but more in particular because they provide a sense of spatial continuity, potentiality, indivisibleness, “open-endedness”: The Otto tent looks keen, brave and potential. . . . Around the perimeter the plastic membrane hangs as a flap. It will be rolled up like a blind on hot days to let the breezes through. . . . Thus the design is, literally as well as figuratively, open-ended. It could be expanded to cover the whole Expo site, if requested, without losing its integrity, unity or composure. The casualness of the mesh and membrane mixture, the tilt of the masts against the tension, and the open-endedness, all contribute to a fair-like character that is thoroughly appropriate, despite Expo’s pretensions to seriousness. The authorities asked pavilion designers specifically for architecture of an unfamiliar mien. In many other pavilions they were presented with shapes much more unfamiliar than a tent. Yet these others, which are often quite frantic, still look more ordinary than an Otto tent. The obviously temporary quality is also very fitting for a show which will last only six months. . . . When this pavilion has done its Expo job it can be dismantled, rolled up, and returned to Germany. There is something disturbing – actually aesthetically disturbing – about some other pavilions done in massive brick and concrete for only six months’ life.33 Considered against such a theoretical framework, Boyd’s propensity to flexibility and potentiality reveals strong empathic affinities to Heidegger’s constant call for a meditative thinking as a means to confuse the rationally constructed duality between subject and object. Boyd’s inclination to a sense of openness and indeterminateness as an echo of his own disengagement from canonical modernism emblematically reflects Heidegger’s critique of the exasperation of the ‘subjectivism-objectivism’ duality in modern age cultures. Where many mainstream modernist positions tend to construct a world of objective entities, the Heideggerian approach of the Melbourne architect guides him to release himself to these representations, again to say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ to them, to accept the exasperated objectivism of the culture of modernity which increasingly predisposes our logos to ‘picture the world’ and yet at the same time to intuit that this is no more than a conventional cognitive way, an illusorily attempt to generate a sense of control for overcoming our original anguish. At the edge of mainstream modernist approaches inclined to validate architecture by establishing accords between informative predetermined ideas and

14  Robin Boyd: spatial continuity final solutions, Boyd is not tempted, nor interested, in satisfying his enquiries through the mere reassurance of definitive, thus partial truths – through outcomes from representational and creative processes that seem only ‘onesidedly’ guided by forms of rationality and logic. I’m thinking here, among other possible references, of Roy Grounds’ forms as translations of geometrical references; Harry Seidler’s abstract shapes as an homage to modern art;34 Peter Muller’s organicist metaphors; Sydney Ancher’s pristine functionalist compositions; Peter McIntyre’s heroic interpretations from structural expressionism; and Frederick Romberg’s formal solutions as obvious interpretations of the European expressionism that he brought with him to Australia.35 The different, ‘poetic’ way that places both Heidegger and Boyd beyond mainstream modernist approach is reflected in their capability of embracing at once and simultaneously the two quintessential conditions of our being: inevitable rational determination of entities, and yet irrational intuition of undeterminable dimensions. The latter are continuously investigated upon, reflected about, searched for, tested through, and yet kept in their state of invisibility and inexplicability by the ‘poetic’ openness of the philosopher and the architect – Heidegger eloquently suggests that “in the familiar appearances, the poet calls the alien as that to which the invisible imparts itself in order to remain what it is – unknown.”36 Boyd’s inclusive thinking, his unconditioned engagement with the vast, ungraspable space and sky, is open to an unmeasurable all-inclusiveness of things – to an inexplicable, and yet original dimension of the world as “oneness”.37 Subliminally re-calling an incomprehensible “world’s worlding”38 and yet embracing the comprehensible accords which are represented by our rational logos as conventional explanations of the world, Boyd cannot escape producing explicable and measurable parts and at the same time remaining in the ‘hope for’ – continuously deferring to – an inexplicable and intangible dimension of the whole. The ultimate sense of indeterminateness that pervades both his writings and projects is structured on tangible components that either as theoretical postulation points or individual design solutions are the representation of reassuring reasons in response to the request for calculation and accordance imposed by our logos. Their ‘presence’, either as intelligible theoretical hypotheses (in his writings) or visible separate spaces (in his projects), inform and coexist with the vagueness of the unreachable oneness that is indeed destined to ever stay in a state of potentiality – in the ‘(h)openness’ to be grasped.39 Heidegger’s wonderings more specifically related to the notion of space perfectly address Boyd’s sense of indeterminateness: But space – does it remain the same? Is space itself not that space which received its first determination from Galileo and Newton? Space – is it that homogeneous expanse, not distinguished at any of its possible places, equivalent toward each direction, but not perceptible with the senses? Space – is it that which, since that time (Newton), challenges modern man increasingly and ever more obstinately to its utter control?. . . . Yet, can the

Robin Boyd: spatial continuity 15 physically-technologically projected space, however it may be determined henceforth, be held as the sole genuine space?40 Suspicious of modern tendencies to the depiction of a world determined and measured by human beings, and by them represented in accordance to themselves as subjects, Boyd’s projects are suggestive of an incomprehensible, uncontrollable dimension of space as a continuous “homogeneous expanse . . . equivalent toward each direction”.41 Yet, his critique of “physically-technologically projected space”42 as represented by modernity does embrace the equally original condition that ineluctably makes us perceive phenomena as objects/representations in space that are external to us,43 and, as such, comprehended through our logos as interrelated to one another. Consistently hoping for and suggestive of a continuity/oneness of space, Boyd’s projects at the same time inescapably comprise separate individual parts and spaces. As we’ll see in the following section of the book presenting a selection of projects, a consistent sense of spatial continuity between things is hoped for and evoked through the presence of components that cannot escape to be parts, and yet are at the same time questioned for being parts that in logical relationship to each other constitute the whole. In light of this, the essential and truly radical contribution of these projects resides in their ability to wonder about common reassuring assumptions that make human beings perceive and think of the world as if it were nothing but made up of individual parts, things, spaces. Boyd’s projects call for an incomprehensible continuity of space, for an inexplicable and unmeasurable sense of belonging together of things, through a calling that although destined to be depending on forms of spatial separation or individuality of components, does however at the same time question these inerasable metaphysical conceptions of the world. Boyd’s wondering destabilises the canonical way of perceiving the world as a combination of wholes made up of parts. The parts of Boyd’s projects, condemned to be comprehended and represented as parts by both our intrinsic perceptive modes and logical thinking, always defer to a further incomprehensible dimension – the oneness of space and things, a landscape. The parts – as individual spaces, volumes, components of his projects – enquire into these existential conditions by absorbing their part-ness. Accepting to be unavoidably perceived and represented as parts, they question at the same time the many conventional forms of hierarchy that are normally established, and uncritically assumed, between the parts of an architectural project. In this way, relational situations between parts which are conventionally informed by a sense of duality and separation become less certain and definitive in regards to their presupposed state of differentiation. Inevitably comprehended by our logos as interrelated individual parts, at the same time they trigger wondering in regards to this apparent relational state. Questioning the state of separation and difference between parts, Boyd’s works wonder about the appropriateness of the term ‘and’ as a relational

16  Robin Boyd: spatial continuity conjunctive between definitions – of spaces and entities in general – that are rationally perceived as individual and separate parts; some more recurrent examples of dualities destabilised in Boyd’s projects include: • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

house and landscape interior and exterior front façade and back façade structural and infrastructural elements servicing and serviced spaces indoor volumes and outdoor voids daytime and night-time areas living rooms and bedrooms kitchen/dining and laundry areas ‘verticality’ of façades and ‘horizontality’ of roofs carport and pedestrian portico areas front yard and back yard deck area and rooftop fences and walls up and down spaces warm and cold areas indoor artificial and outdoor natural environments.

Informed by parts that are non-hierarchically related, hence reciprocally cobelonging together and therefore virtually conjugated by the term ‘or’ rather than ‘and’, Boyd’s projects affirm the intrinsically rational perceptive act that makes us read and think spaces in their own individuality as distinctive parts of a whole; yet at the same time they question this very same rational assumption through spatial resolutions that disconcert the sense of hierarchy and distinctiveness which normally characterise typical forms of duality and separation between parts: • flyscreens instead of glazed windows as ‘separations’ – but also means of continuity – between outside and inside; • outdoor spaces as ‘outdoor rooms’, informed by similar dimensions and proportions of indoor rooms; • roofs extended to be façades and to cover deck areas and/or carports; • outdoor landscapes and vegetated ground brought ‘inside’, defiant of all forms of separation that conventionally confine them ‘outside of’ enclosed volumes; • outdoor balconies as continuous spatial extensions, in scale and character, of indoor rooms; • living rooms as bedrooms, and corridors/circulation spaces as additional areas for study, children’s play and other un-programmed activities; • garages/carports as entry halls;

Robin Boyd: spatial continuity 17 • internalised outdoor courtyards as circulation crossings and additional enclosed/external living spaces; • front yards as back yards and vice versa; • trees’ canopies as sheltering elements and ‘natural awnings’; • undercroft spaces as additional landscape, carport or spill-out areas for extra amenities; • rooms ‘un-divided’ by light and permeable furnishing/partitions, as loosely individualised parts of the same continuous whole space; • ‘indoor’ space defined by continuity of roof line (rather than by partitioning of ground plane) and expanded beyond itself, integrated with surrounding space through the compression exercised by the roof line. These and others of Boyd’s design resolutions are essentially characterised by a dimension of all-inclusiveness, in which the parts do reciprocally belong together as individual elements and yet are con-fused in their Heideggerian “simple onefold of worlding”.44 Not surprisingly Boyd talks to the public, via a television program, about indivisibility between interiors and exteriors through a comparison with the sense of inseparability that characterises the inside and outside of a tumbler,45 the same object that is emblematically mentioned by Heidegger to speculate on the inexplicable and physically indeterminable dimension of spatial continuity between entities: “To empty a glass means: to gather the glass, as that which can contain something, into its having been freed.”46 Inseparability and continuity of space is something to which Boyd aspires, yet this aspiration is also at the same time counteracted by the awareness of individually defined “secluded” entities in the name of privacy – concluding the chapter on ‘Space’ in his book Living in Australia, Boyd suggests: I have the feeling that ultimate architectural perfection will be achieved in a building of which every part is visible to any viewer at all times while any part is private to any user at any time he wishes for seclusion.47 Linking ecology and architecture – Baracco+Wright Architects in the trajectory of Robin Boyd The projects included in the following section of this book, documented through site plans, plans and sections that consistently comprise built components (the building/s) and their surrounding open spaces (in the form of either designed or existing natural landscapes), disclose their two different coexisting states: while on the one hand they are legible as rational representations of parts which are accorded in relation to each other and to the whole in a logical way, on the other hand they also appear as illogical/irrational ‘con-fusions’ of parts, wondering on an inexplicable and unmeasurable sense of spatial oneness. As already mentioned, referring in particular to some specific works, Boyd’s projects are in many ways and through various design solutions in empathy with Heidegger’s

18  Robin Boyd: spatial continuity call for “the belonging together of things”:48 from states of spatial continuity released by tenuous and impalpable partitions, to conditions of indivisibility – visual and physical – between indoor and outdoor spaces, from their deferring to indeterminable dimensions through the means of relentless and potentially infinite modular grids,49 to a consistent level of integration – an inextricable interconnection – between landscape and architectural elements, to the sense of flexibility and multi-programming that inform many of the projects’ areas, to the pervasive degree of ambiguity that in projects for exhibition installations weakens the conventional forms of dualism between ‘contents’ and ‘containers’. The ‘confusion’ and ‘poetic vagueness’ of these works are not only means to provoke unconscious engagement with our existential conditions and related implications around the notions of space and place in architecture, but also pertinent characters to define a body of (Boyd’s) work that is significantly sustainable and efficient in regards to energy and material consumption. Through ‘con-fusion’ and reciprocal co-belongingness of architectural spaces, these projects are spatially efficient and yet generous in their restraint. They allow: • Accommodation of many different activities at once or in disparate moments of the building’s everyday life; • Condensation of various programs in adaptable, flexible and allencompassing spaces; • Opportunistic integration of natural and landscape resources (breeze for cross-ventilation; water for cooling; trees and vegetation for shading; sunlight and other natural elements as instrumental means to architecture) inside and outside built volumes that are typically unobtrusive and appropriately compact, never excessively or indulgently large. For all these reasons, Boyd’s work is profoundly in touch with the land, landscapes and natural resources of the Australian environment, beyond the ‘scientific’ measuring of sustainability. Usually the term ‘sustainable’ when applied to architecture continues the detachment from nature as something domesticated. The term commonly means efficient energy use, water harvesting, thermal performance and so on, where the relationship with and impact on the natural environment is measurable yet out of sight from the spatial condition. Also and perhaps more meaningfully, it does not take into account the irreversible impact on the microscopic ancient soil structure and symbiotic organisms, the associated hydrology of a site and the effects several kilometres away on a watercourse, among others. While the wider understanding of the latter was only beginning at the time of Boyd’s activity, contemporary architects need to engage with such broader and now extensive knowledge in order that architecture remains relevant. Boyd’s relevance, proposed in relation to seminal topics that inform current discourse around the relationship between urban and natural environments and their engagement with climate and social change, is also of course depicted here through a deep sense of empathy that we, the authors – Baracco+Wright Architects – feel towards the design approach of this architect. The close attention

Robin Boyd: spatial continuity 19 we pay to Boyd’s work is also directed to other references that are part of our ‘topological space’, all reciprocally correlated by degrees of affinity defined by us, in absence of specific chronological and space boundaries.50 Some of these – the Smithsons, Kazuo Shinohara, Giancarlo De Carlo, Fred Williams, John Brack and Hugh Buhrich, just to name a few – have a more direct relationship with the Melbourne architect.51 Others inhabit the same topological space, indirectly and yet compellingly sharing analogous sensibilities with Boyd and between each other, in accordance to the personal interpretation we apply to these references, and the triangulations we like to trace between them.52 In different ways these references constellate a trajectory informed by similar thoughts and approaches, critical of modern ideals excessively based on scientific and technological progress. Boyd, and the other peers along this lineage, consistently practise ‘calculative’ and ‘meditative’ thinking at once, wondering about incalculable dimensions beyond the objective, finite, outcomes of their day-to-day production. They all go hand in hand, interested in the local (culture and place) and yet never parochially trapped by literal regionalist idioms, drawn by spatial continuity and integration of architecture and landscape rather than by self-referential formalist exercises, inclined to generosity of space through buildings that go beyond themselves in addressing their public and open surroundings, embracing urban sustainability and regimes of care by exploring flexible and multi-programmable spaces, and carrying out insightful engagement with land and open vegetated space. In addition to all these characteristics, and specifically related to Australia, Boyd has always been deeply aware of the tormented, uneasy relationship between Australian people and the endless horizons and overwhelming sky of their open space53 – a relationship with a sense of infinity and unboundedness that for thousands of years could be experienced with no trouble at all, it would seem, by indigenous inhabitants of this land, never concerned in calculative measuring of their world, intimately in touch with it through wondering and wandering practices over its land where notions of – and dichotomies between – subject and object do not appear to exist. Far from suggesting that Boyd consciously addressed Australian environment through aboriginal-related approaches, this book does however intend to instigate reflections on the qualities of this architect who advocated care for land, space, natural and urban landscapes at a time when many other late modernist agendas were generally directed to different ideas of urban evolution. We first properly engaged with Boyd’s work in their sites when in 1998 prepared an itinerary of some of his Melbourne work for Domus magazine.54 Since then, together with other concerns about the destruction of remnant vegetation, urban sprawl and land degradation generally, we have increasingly looked for ways to address these issues. Our reflections on Boyd’s work have somewhat developed through this lens – finding in his work a meaningful approach that we have tried to carry forward. Having asked at the beginning of this chapter how architecture might develop in the trajectory of Boyd, we can provide examples in some of the ways we have been inching forward in this lineage.

20  Robin Boyd: spatial continuity An early and important project for our office, Garage+Deck+Landscape, 2006 (Fig 0.12, Fig 0.13) links two front gardens, pursuing an aim to join up open vegetated space wherever possible to contribute to the health of what is now called urban ecology: habitat, local climatic control, stormwater infiltration, soil health, amenity and the integration of private land into a larger network of open vegetated space. Although at its beginning an ‘architectural’ project – to provide a garage at the front of a house – a landscape solution enabled us to address much more than the primary brief, dismantling traditional architecture, landscape and urban design boundaries. In this project, although quite small, we thought of the intervention as part of a larger urban and natural system, and of a form that, although artificially, works with the geography of the site – the new hill is only a slight exaggeration of an existing rise. A commission to design a holiday house at a farm in the ancient hills of Barrabool in western Victoria, Barrabool Landscape Design and Re-fit, 2015 (Fig 0.14, Fig 0.15, Fig 0.16, Fig 0.17), around 100 kilometres south west of Melbourne, on a rise above a flood plain and river, was another important moment in our office. Although previously cultivated land, an actual building in this location (and all that goes with that) was an intervention in a landscape with some natural remnant vegetation, hydrology and ancient soil structure, and uphill from a river, that we were uneasy to make. Alternatives were sought. We instead agreed with the client to adapt some existing underutilised farm sheds into a residence, thus no new land was occupied, and existing buildings could take on a new life. This project is ongoing today with the conversion of more existing buildings, and a territorial scale planting design that links a larger network of remnant and revegetated patches to and along watercourses and also runs through and around the existing buildings. Rather than increase the encroachment of buildings, we reversed the approach, where now the vegetation will ‘encroach’ the buildings. The idea of reversing the emphasis, or perhaps releasing architecture from being the ‘object’ (although we recognise they are undeniably objects in physicality), was also pursued through teaching and research activities including a laboratory spanning several years entitled Tree Sprawl – as opposed to urban sprawl. We looked for opportunities in existing urban environments to join up and vegetate open space and link it to local natural systems, in particular waterways.55 This approach has been pursued at a much larger scale in the research project Regenerated Towns in Regenerated Nature which has been focussing on landscape, architectural and urban interventions for rural towns in decline located in one of the areas – West Wimmera – that are part of ‘Habitat 141’, a fifty-year vision coordinated by Greening Australia that aims to restore and reconnect iconic landscapes that straddle the South Australian and Victorian borders, extending for around 700 kilometres from coastal environments to rangelands in New South Wales along the 141st meridian. Speculative proposals produced through this research project seek to physically bring the revegetation into the urban centres of the towns, but also contribute to regeneration of local economies by designing infrastructure that could service this project.56 In this case there is a repositioning of the architect as agent, finding the role for

Robin Boyd: spatial continuity 21 design beyond a traditional brief. This could be seen as a natural progression of challenging the traditional role of the architect and is an important part of the trajectory. It is not by chance that the development of one lineage of Boyd’s approach discussed here, is based heavily in landscape. It concerns relationships between buildings and landscape, rather than being a shift towards the discipline of landscape architecture as practitioners. The relationship between building and landscape in Boyd’s work was often spatially symbiotic, and on occasion some arrangements might be called ‘sustainable’ today. In a design for a house in a coastal suburb of Victoria, Rose House 2009 (Fig 0.18, Fig 0.19, Fig 0.20, Fig 0.21), opportunities were sought that joined up open space. Rather than make one large building, the house is split into three volumes – a garage/laundry/workshop/storage, a big and a small house, the last two connected by a central outdoor deck. An existing separated volume (fisherman’s shack) in the site has been transformed into a library, also participating in the interplay between parts that activate the outdoor landscape. This move continues the built and open space pattern of the surrounding area of small buildings scattered in the landscape and allows for open space to connect around the relatively smaller buildings as well as the retaining of the natural ground plane. A small project for ourselves, Garden House, 2013–15 (Fig 0.22, Fig 0.23, Fig 0.24, Fig 0.25) demonstrates further a trajectory of how architecture can develop in its relationship to landscape. It reveals the importance of understanding a site when choosing the placement of a building. We think of this building as a kind of semi-permanent tent. Careful restoration of the indigenous vegetation and observation of the geology and hydrology were undertaken over a couple of years in order to determine the siting plan and related spatial character. It is a project that carries on some interests of our office in simple forms, in loose spatial qualities that join with larger open spaces of their situations, in veranda-type spaces as helpful means in strategically achieving this, and in the role of vegetation in the overall design. The project site is part of a settlement that is an anomaly of an historical subdivision where a strip of remnant vegetation was left over among cleared farmland – an amazing peek into what would have been there, although it too is now mostly altered. ‘Ghost landscapes’ are discussed by Australian historian Gary Presland in a fascinating book that looks at the history of Melbourne from the point of view of nature, also trying to document pre-settlement natural histories through traces.57 Ghost landscapes are indeed such an essential and recurrent ‘presence’ in the environments of Australia and are often available. For example, although the indigenous vegetation and natural systems of our project site were altered – mainly through the presence of pasture grass – these conditions became gradually available to us through sheer time spent there and the implementation of a re-vegetation technique called the Bradley method.58 This beautifully simple technique involves allowing the previously mown grass to grow so that the small remnants of indigenous vegetation could grow too, and weeding them

22  Robin Boyd: spatial continuity so they could expand, and also hunting for them among the grass. The diagrams of this project over time show the evolution and restoration of the landscape undertaken through the Bradley method, and the emergence of a tea tree heath vegetation including seasonal orchids, lilies, small herbaceous plants and native grasses (Fig 0.22). Originally a natural choice for a building was the rear area, defined by a ring of trees. However, after time it became apparent that there was really only one option – the only area where no plants emerged – and it was learnt from older locals that fill had been dumped there; maintaining the original soil is the first rule of regeneration, together with the hydrology and ground profile – a dilemma for architects whose job normally and primarily consists in taking up the land. The design preserves the existing natural ground, allowing it and seasonal floodwaters to move through the building under a raised deck. Over the time of our inhabitation we have also discovered that the vegetation as well – a stand of tea trees – has started to spread inside, prompting us to suspend our initial plans to plant inside, so as to allow for the vegetation to make its own way through. A blue tongue lizard’s movement across the site has not been interrupted – he often walks through. The building/shelter is an offthe-shelf kit shed. Like a tent, it could be removed and the impact would be relatively minimal; through the construction process only about one cubic metre of waste was produced (mostly recyclable), no soil was dislodged and only a small amount was disturbed for the footings. Unlike previous use of sheds and clear cladding that aim to create large cheap volume, here the clear cladding allows the plants to grow, and allows us to enjoy the stars, moon, fog, birds and plants, and sometimes be a bit hot and cold. These qualities revealed in this unusual process would not often be readily evident in urban contexts, but every now and then make themselves known, particularly through stormwater overland flow paths and flooding. If this approach was included in our reading of context and the local, very different exciting architecture may evolve. Some poignant lines by architect Melanie Dodd discuss the latter work in relation to the overall design approach of our office. We feel these observations could equally describe Boyd’s approach, and provide an accurate depiction of the trajectory of architecture linked to ecology that we have been trying to establish here and that began with many of Boyd’s works integral to their landscape: Baracco + Wright Architects is interested in the way that the infrastructure of towns and cities can be more mindful of its environments, ecosystems and local landscapes. In fact, the practice wants to redefine architecture through this process – or rather restate its relevance. The architects want to experiment and devise architectural typologies that, for example, could allow water to move through them, or that could permit the joining up of vegetated space across property boundaries and open up a deeper acknowledgement of a site’s geography, geology and hydrology. This expanded commitment to a quietly progressive architectural urbanism that places

Robin Boyd: spatial continuity 23 indigenous vegetation and ecosystems at its heart might seem odd when set against the regimes of contemporary tabula rasa development that mainstream Australia seems to willingly tolerate. However, a questioning of norms and conventions of suburban settlement seems timely, as does a strategic approach to how the city can be retrofitted or adjusted through techniques that can accommodate densification of otherwise difficult urban sites – flood plains, creeks and utility easements, for example. . . . Most of all, what is humane and delightful about the trajectory that has led to this apparently modest house in the multiple scales of its enquiry. It is clear that Baracco + Wright Architects is as concerned with the minutiae of everyday life – how we might wake up in the morning, garden and cook in a place – as it is with the way that these regimes could be scaled up to effect urban regeneration at the scale of the city and the environment. This sensitivity for moving back and forth between 1:1 and 1:1000 scale infrastructures of the city is a foil to the conventionally detached bird’s-eye view of policymakers and planners, where thinking rarely meets the ground, nor is played out as lived experience. In contrast, Baracco + Wright Architects intimately understands that the ground – and our habitual ecosystems of everyday life – are powerful stabilities from which a more radical urban thinking can emerge.59 Boyd’s projects and writings discerningly hint to the points put forward by Dodd. Spatial continuity and the other correlated notions discussed in relation to his design approach are sensibilities profoundly aligned, already half a century ago, to current strategies inclined to address urban and social challenges through considerate rehabilitation, adaptive re-use and transformation of the existing, rather than heroic and formulaic master-planning operations. Boyd was perspicaciously aware of the continuous exploitation of land and natural resources that has been occurring through modernity, exacerbated from industrial revolution onwards. He may have not read Heidegger, but the concerns expressed by the German philosopher in regards to “nature becoming a gigantic gasoline station, an energy source for modern technology and industry”60 is something that is unconsciously and yet inherently at the core of the calls of this Melbourne architect for appropriate “techniques of design”.61 His multidisciplinary approach and propensity to engage with extended cultural and professional fields share a remarkable affinity with current strategic thinking that sees many contemporary architects increasingly operating by integrating complex systems and seemingly polarised aims through design processes that involve close collaboration between different various parties, including community active participation normally interested in caring for the ‘minutiae’ of urban and environmental situations rather than in pre-deterministic grandiose plans. The endless conversations that Boyd used to have with his clients prior and throughout the design process62 are also a further indication of his openness and flexibility in thinking as essential qualities for proactively proceeding through the complexity of strategic and pluralist rather than deterministic ‘one-sided’ approaches. His widespread commitment to social and cultural

24  Robin Boyd: spatial continuity development is also clearly expressed by his coordination, together with Neil Clerehan, of the Small Homes program that through the pages of the Melbourne newspaper The Age could expose the wider community to excellent design and provide many of these with high-standard affordable projects.63 Boyd moved through the whole design process by embracing at once cross-field research, case study investigation, speculative testing and strategic engagement with society, according to a dynamic thinking that often leads to innovative and provocative combinations of program, siting and built form, where outcomes can be far-reaching, addressing issues beyond the traditional domain of the building and/or individual object. This type of process and thinking is extremely critical to address complex issues of climate and social change. In Boyd’s design and theoretical speculations we see inclination to spatial continuity as an overarching strategy that in many different ways disposes this architect to insightfully explore how and where people live, work, preserve moments of privacy, but also share community activities, inhabit their land and urban environments, produce their food, participate into the world from their specific place; we see how all these types of explorations produce solutions that pertinently engage with open space, combining sustainable, social and environmental concerns. These issues land at the feet of traditional concerns of urban design, architecture and landscape architecture: land use and urbanisation, big and small systems and relationships. Many cities have been aiming to address open space and the rehabilitation of land and waterways (especially from industrial uses) as a way to address climate change for a while now through redefinition of infrastructure and landscape: New York High Performance Parks, Boston’s ‘Big Dig’ and London’s Lower Lea Valley among others, but there hasn’t seemed to be much of a role for architecture. To us it seems an important progression of architecture and something worth doing. Ultimately, as inhabitants of Australia, our attitude to the care of land is an important gesture of reconciliation.

Figure 0.1. Carnich Towers (unbuilt), Robin Boyd, 1969–71. Drawing, Baracco + Wright Architects.

Figure 0.2. Current view from north east, Domain Park Flats 1960–62. Photograph, Aaron Pocock.

Figure 0.3. Current view from balcony towards Botanic Gardens, Domain Park Flats, Robin Boyd, 1960–62. Photograph, Mauro Baracco.

Figure 0.4. View of Southgate Fountains (demolished), Robin Boyd, 1957–60. Photography, Mark Strizic, 1928–2012, © Courtesy of the Estate of the Artist.

Figure 0.5. Current view of north façade, John Batman Motor Inn, Robin Boyd, 1962. Figure 0.6.  Current view from terrace, John Batman Motor Inn, Robin Boyd, 1962. Photographs, Aaron Pocock.

Figure 0.7.  Jimmy Watson’s Wine Bar, façade, Robin Boyd, 1961–63. Figure 0.8.  Jimmy Watson’s Wine Bar, interior, Robin Boyd, 1961–63. Photographs, Mark Strizic, 1928–2012, © Courtesy the Estate of the Artist.

Figure 0.9. Pelican House (demolished), Robin Boyd, 1956–57. Photograph, Peter Wille, Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria.

Figure 0.10.  View of ‘The First 200 Years’, exhibition fitout, Robin Boyd, 1968. Figure 0.11.  Section of ‘The First 200 Years’, exhibition fitout, Robin Boyd, 1968. Drawings, Baracco + Wright Architects.

Figure 0.12. Plan, 1:400, Garage+Deck+Landscape, Kew, Melbourne, Baracco+Wright Architects, 2006. Figure 0.13. Street view, Garage+Deck+Landscape, Baracco+Wright Architects, 2006. Photograph, Aaron Pocock.

Figure 0.14. Context Plan, 1:10000, Barrabool Farm, landscape design, Barrabool, Victoria, Baracco+Wright Architects, 2015.

Figure 0.15. Site Plan, 1:500, ex-farm buildings, Barrabool Farm, landscape and re-fit, Baracco+Wright Architects, 2015.

Figure 0.16. View of repurposed stables, Barrabool Farm, Baracco+Wright Architects, 2015. Figure 0.17. View of veranda added to stables, Baracco+Wright Architects, 2015. Photographs, Jonathan Ware.

Figure 0.18. Context plan, 1:5000, Rose House, Merricks Beach, Victoria, Baracco+ Wright Architects, 2009. Figure 0.19. View of scattered buildings, Rose House, Baracco+Wright Architects, 2009. Photograph, Aaron Pocock.

Figure 0.20. Floor plan, 1:400, Rose House, Baracco+Wright Architects, 2009. Figure 0.21. View of separate volumes and deck, Rose House, Baracco+Wright Architects, 2009. Photograph, Aaron Pocock.

Figure 0.22. Site conditions plan, 1:1000, top 2011, bottom 2013, Garden House, Westernport, Victoria, Baracco+Wright Architects, 2013–15. Figure 0.23. Floor plan, 1:400, Garden House, Baracco+Wright Architects, 2013–15.

Figure 0.24. View, west façade, Garden House, Baracco+Wright Architects, 2013–15. Figure 0.25. View of interior, Garden House, Baracco+Wright Architects, 2013–15. Photographs, Lisa Atkinson.

38  Robin Boyd: spatial continuity

Notes 1 Tim Winton, Island Home; A Landscape Memoir, Hamish Hamilton (Penguin Books), Australia, 2015, p. 16. 2 Boyd himself uses the term ‘parasol’ to describe the roof of the McClune House, one of his many projects provided with a large and continuous cover over the whole footprint, including indoor and outdoor spaces. Often these large roofs extend beyond the building’s footprint. Robin Boyd, Living in Australia, Pergamon Press, Sydney, 1970, p. 105. 3 Boyd’s list of designed and published work is remarkably extensive, especially when considered in relation to his relatively short life. His books include: Victorian Modern: One Hundred and Eleven Years of Modern Architecture in Victoria, Australia, Architectural Students’ Society of the Royal Victorian Institute of Architects, Melbourne, 1947; Australia’s Home, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1952; The Australian Ugliness, F. W. Cheshire, Melbourne, Australia, 1960; Kenzo Tange, George Braziller, New York, 1962; The Walls around Us: The Story of Australian Architecture, F. W. Cheshire, Melbourne, Australia, 1962; The New Architecture, Longmans, Melbourne, 1963; Artificial Australia, The Boyer Lectures 1967, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Sydney, 1968; New Directions in Japanese Architecture, George Braziller, New York, 1968; Living in Australia, Pergamon Press, Sydney, 1970; Living and Partly Living, Thomas Nelson (Australia), Melbourne, 1971 (co-authored with others); The Great Great Australian Dream, Pergamon Press, Sydney, 1972.   In addition to these, Boyd wrote innumerable articles and reviews for journals, magazines and newspapers, in Australia and internationally – for a detailed account of his published and designed work see respectively: Karen Burns, Harriet Edquist (eds.), Robin Boyd: The Architect as Critic, Transition Publishing, Melbourne, 1989; and Harriet Edquist (ed.), Robin Boyd, a monographic issue of Transition, no. 38, 1992.   Furthermore, a detailed account of the biography and professional life of Melbourne architect Robin Boyd is succinctly narrated in the preface, and more exhaustively discussed in the rest of a book by Australian historian Geoffrey Serle: Robin Boyd: A Life, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne 1995. Also Australian architectural historian Conrad Hamann has extensively discussed Boyd’s work; see in particular Modern Architecture in Melbourne: The Architecture of Grounds, Romberg and Boyd. 1927–1971, PhD thesis, Visual Art Department, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, July 1978. In addition to the books by Boyd listed earlier, further relevant bibliographic background to this book from the architect’s published work include the following: RB, ‘Mornington Peninsula’, Architecture, vol. 38, no. 4, October–December 1950; RB, ‘The Vanishing Gumtree: Have You Ever Tried to Find One in the Suburbs?’, The Age, 5 April 1950; RB, ‘A New Eclecticism?’, The Architectural Review, vol. 110, no. 657, September 1951; RB, ‘The Functional Neurosis’, The Architectural Review, vol. 119, no. 710, February 1956; RB, ‘The Search for Pleasingness’, Progressive Architecture, vol. 38, no. 4, April 1957; RB, ‘Engineering of Excitement’, The Architectural Review, vol. 124, no. 742, November 1958; RB, ‘A Response to “Six Questions on Italian Architecture” ’, in Quindici anni di architettura italiana (Fifteen Years of Italian Architecture), a monographic issue of Casabella, no. 261, May 1961; RB, ‘Under Tension’, The Architectural Review, vol. 134, no. 801, November 1963; RB, ‘The State of Australian Architecture’, Architecture in Australia, vol. 56, no. 3, June 1967; RB, ‘The Sad End of New Brutalism’, The Architectural Review, vol. 142, no. 845, July 1967; RB, ‘Germany’ (A Review of the German Pavilion at the 1967 Montreal International Exposition), The Architectural Review, vol. 142, no. 846, August 1967; RB, ‘The NineteenSixties in Focus’, in John Button (ed.), Look Here! Considering the Australian

Robin Boyd: spatial continuity 39 Environment, F. W. Cheshire, Melbourne, 1968; RB, ‘The Neighbourhood’, in Ian McKay, Robin Boyd, Hugh Stretton, John Mant (eds.), Living and Partly Living, Thomas Nelson (Australia), Melbourne, 1971. 4 See Mauro Baracco, Coexistence of Rational Definiteness and Irrational Oneness; An Investigation of Robin Boyd’s Architecture and Theoretical Approach through a Heideggerian Perspective, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, 2010. 5 Architecture of the 20th century is discussed by Boyd in his book The Puzzle of Architecture (Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1965), which is his personal contribution to the history of modern architecture, including examples around the world that are described as informed by functional, monumental and transcendental design – this book, illustrated all throughout with line drawings by the author, is the consolidation and further expansion of previous articles written by Boyd for The Architectural Review and Harper’s Magazine. 6 In his response to ‘Six Questions on Italian Architecture’, Boyd is strongly supportive of Italian deviations from mainstream modernism. This goes symptomatically hand in hand with the sense of deviation that all his work expresses in regards to mainstream modernism, as well as with his overall encouragement towards shifts from mainstream modern architecture; in Boyd’s own words, from “two predictable failures of twentieth-century architecture – first its marriage with the machine and then its search for significant form”, Boyd, The Puzzle of Architecture, p. 156. 7 “Architecture’s first duty is to the fabric of which it forms part” is a sentence written for Domus magazine by Peter Smithson on 26 January 1994, and published in Domus, no. 759, April 1994, p. 6. This sentence is reflective of an approach that has increasingly informed the Smithsons’ thought and work since the beginning of the 1960s. Differently from Reyner Banham, who attacked some late work of the Smithsons (in particular their Economist Building, London, 1959–64) as a retreat from ‘brutalism’ informed by a resurfaced interest for an aesthetics of ‘classical’ formal solutions (see Rayner Banham, The New Brutalism, The Architectural Press, London, 1966), Boyd praises the sense of realism, and close relation to the existing urban context, in the name of which the Smithsons designed their project: When faced with the workaday politics connected with a building in the West End, the Smithsons bent their principles too far to keep Banham with them. But they got something built. They knew that the heroic “swagger” of Brutalism which was good for the lecture platform, or for a competition entry or for a small house, had to be modified slightly for a school, more for a public building, and almost completely rewritten for St. James’s Street, where stuck-on stone was better appreciated. . . . The greatest hope of every architectural evangelical movement like New Brutalism is that it will lead the world away from seductive aesthetic pleasures to the pure intelligence of building. The failure of New Brutalism . . . was that it preached almost exclusively to the converted. It was a wouldbe “sort of social dialogue” (the Smithsons phrase) that remained an architectural monologue. The problem still with us is to build our accepted ethics into that “working morality” for day to day building. Robin Boyd, ‘The Sad End of New Brutalism’, The Architectural Review, vol. 142, no. 845, July 1967, p. 11. 8 The critique of ‘featurism’ in architecture is the main topic of Boyd’s book The Australian Ugliness. 9 From the moving sands of the centre to the deep snow of the southern Alps almost the full range of the world’s climates are to be found in Australia. But few people have built homes in these climatic extremes. However, the range between the southern capitals and tropical northern towns has been sufficient to

40  Robin Boyd: spatial continuity produce two entirely different geographic types. One was the southern villa, bottled up, introverted, its thick walls storing the comfort of mild weather through occasional hot or cold spells. The other was the northern bungalow, light, open, elevated, an encircling verandah its principal living space. Robin Boyd, Australia’s Home, Penguin, Melbourne, 1968, p. 211 (First Edition: Melbourne University Press, 1952). 10 Boyd observes: A few years of living, after 1945, in a house where the children and the children’s friends were never really out of earshot, convinced many parents that open planning had its limitations. Some began to wonder if this first move to free the standard plan of its rigid little compartments – this combination of formal and informal spaces – should have been the last move instead. A new grouping of rooms was sometimes suggested. This put the parents’ bedroom with the livingroom and segregated a self-contained bed and play section for the children. At a Modern Home Exhibition in Melbourne in 1949, final year students of architecture at the University of Melbourne exhibited ten model houses. Eight of the plans were based on a division of the house into parents’ and children’s sections, each with their own living, sleeping and bathing facilities. The entrance section and kitchen were shared. . . . Beyond observing the essential condition that servants’ wings were to be separate, 19th-century architects had had few theories on “zoning”, as the 20th century described the process of grouping different activities in a plan. Automatically in most cases they had differentiated and separated in some way the day and night activities. Thus, bedrooms and bathrooms were upstairs, and sitting-rooms, dining-rooms and kitchens were downstairs in twostorey houses, while in the larger, rambling single-storey plans the bedrooms took a separate wing. The same division was made more self-consciously and obviously in the 20th century. Living, dining, and cooking were grouped, beds and bath were grouped – the two sections meeting at their service ends. L-shape, U-shape, T-shape and rectangular plans all followed this principle. The new idea of the architectural students, apparent also in a few recent houses and projects of architects’ houses, provided segregation of age groups, not of activities. This was a different zoning theory of considerable significance. Houses designed on this principle could have little in common with those of any other period. Ibid., pp. 166, 167. 11 Boyd, ‘The Neighbourhood’, p. 39. 12 Geoff Wescott, Back to Basics; Breakthrough Proposals for the Australian Environment, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia, 2009, p. 15. 13 Among the extensive bibliographic background related to these issues, see the two following contributions: Ladelle McWhorter, Gail Stenstad (eds.), Heidegger and the Earth: Essays in Environmental Philosophy, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2009; Eric S. Nelson, ‘Responding to Heaven and Earth: Daoism, Heidegger and Ecology’, Environmental Philosophy, vol. 1, no. 2, Fall 2004, pp. 65–74. Furthermore, the notion of ‘care’ is effectively identified as an essential point related to Heidegger’s philosophy: Care (or concern) (German: Sorge) A fundamental basis of our being-in-theworld is, for Heidegger, not matter or spirit but care: Dasein’s facticity is such that its Being-in-the-world has always dispersed itself or even split itself up into definite ways of Being-in. The multiplicity of these is indicated by the following examples: having to do with something, producing something, attending to something and looking after it, making use of something, giving something up and letting it go, undertaking, accomplishing, evincing, interrogating, considering, discussing, determining. . . . All these ways of Being-in have concern (Sorge, care) as their kind of Being. Just as the scientist might investigate or

Robin Boyd: spatial continuity 41 search, and presume neutrality, we see that beneath this there is the mood, the concern of the scientist to discover, to reveal new ideas or theories and to attempt to level off temporal aspects. From ‘Heideggerian terminology’, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heideg gerian_terminology. 14 David Saunders, ‘Afterword’, in Boyd, Living in Australia, pp. 147, 148. 15 As poignantly observed by Italian literature critic and theoretician Carla Benedetti, “nell’arte moderna, si sa, vige l’imperativo a differenziarsi. . . . Quando a guidare il giudizio è il valore dell’originalità, si ha sempre, come contraltare, la paura di essere giudicati ‘antiquati.’ ” (“As we know, the imperative demand of modern art is to be different. . . . When the public opinion is guided by the value of originality, then the counter-reaction is to be afraid of being considered ‘antiquated.’ ”); Carla Benedetti, Pasolini contro Calvino, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino, 1998, pp. 74 and 81 (authors’ translation). 16 “In all metaphysics from the beginning of Western thought, Being means being present.” Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? (© Was Heisst Denken? 1954), Harper and Row, New York, 1968, p. 102. 17 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World Picture’ (paper first delivered on 9 June 1938), in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, Harper and Row, New York, 1977, p. 128. 18 Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, in David Farrell Krell (ed.), Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, Harper and Row, New York, 1977, pp. 189–242. 19 One of the most comprehensive documents in relation to Boyd’s entire body of written and built works, including a list of the books of his own personal library is Karen Burns, Harriet Edquist, Robin Boyd: The Architect as Critic. It is the catalogue of the homonymous exhibition curated by Australian historians Karen Burns, Harriet Edquist and Philip Goad (the latter in the role of also specific curator of the bibliography presented at the exhibition and published in the catalogue) at LaTrobe Library, Melbourne, 3–28 July 1989. 20 The following bibliographic list by Massimo Cacciari represents a significant background to the arguments of this book: MC, ‘Eupalinos or Architecture’, Oppositions, no. 21, Summer 1980; MC, Dell’Inizio, Adelphi, Milano, 1990; MC, Architecture and Nihilism: On the Philosophy of Modern Architecture, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, and London, 1993; MC, Geo-filosofia dell’Europa, Adelphi, Milano, 1994; MC, ‘Res aedificatoria: Il “classico” di Mies van der Rohe’, Casabella, no. 629, December 1995, pp. 3–7 (originally published in Paradosso, no. 9, 1994); MC, L’Arcipelago, Adelphi, Milano, 1997; MC, ‘To Dwell, to Think’, Casabella, no. 662/663, December 1998/January 1999; MC, ‘The Shards of the All’, Casabella, no. 684/685, December 2000/January 2001; MC, ‘Nomads in Prison’, Casabella, no. 705, November 2002; MC, La citta’, Pazzini Editore, Villa Verucchio (Rimini), 2006 (first ed., 2004). 21 Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World Picture’, pp. 128, 129, 130, 131, 132. 22 Discussing calculative and meditative thinking as two essential coexisting conditions of human beings, and highlighting that both can be exercised through everyday practices, Heidegger proposes that whenever we plan, research, and organise, we always reckon with conditions that are given. We take them into account with the calculated intention of their serving specific purposes. Thus we can count on definitive results. . . . Such thinking remains calculation even if it neither works with numbers nor uses an adding machine or computer. Calculative thinking computes. It computes ever new, ever more promising and at the same time more economical possibilities. Calculative thinking races from one prospect to the next. Calculative thinking never stops, never collects itself. Calculative thinking is not meditative thinking, not thinking which contemplates the meaning which reigns in everything that is. There are,

42  Robin Boyd: spatial continuity then, two kinds of thinking, each justified and needed in its own way: calculative thinking and meditative thinking. This meditative thinking is what we have in mind when we say that contemporary man is in flight-from-thinking. Yet you may protest: mere meditative thinking finds itself floating unaware above reality. It loses touch. It is worthless for dealing with current business. It profits nothing in carrying out practical affairs. And you may say, finally, that mere meditative thinking, persevering meditation, is “above” the reach of ordinary understanding. In this excuse only this much is true, meditative thinking does not just happen by itself any more than does calculative thinking. At times it requires a greater effort. It demands more practice. It is in need of even more delicate care than any other genuine craft. But is must also be able to bide its time, to await as does the farmer, whether the seed will come up and ripen. Yet anyone can follow the path of meditative thinking in his own manner and within his own limits. Why? Because man is a thinking, that is, a meditative being. Thus meditative thinking need by no means be “high-flown”. It is enough if we dwell on what lies close and meditate on what is closest; upon that which concerns us, each one of us, here and now; here, on this patch of home ground; now, in the present hour of history. Martin Heidegger, ‘Memorial Address’, in Discourse on Thinking (© Gelassenheit, 1959), Harper and Row, New York, 1966, pp. 46, 47. 23 Conrad Hamann has remarked that at every point at which he (Boyd) establishes or reinforces a critical orthodoxy, he tends to counteract it, often in the same book or the same article, often in the same paragraph, sometimes even in the same sentence, with an affinity which appears to develop in his thinking and his writing toward what I would call the inclusive tendency in Australian architecture. Conrad Hamann, ‘Against the Dying of the Light: Robin Boyd and Australian Architecture’, Transition, no. 29, 1989, p. 14. 24 As remarked earlier (see passage referred to in note 14), David Saunders describes the work of the Melbourne architect as informed by “no dominant Boyd style”. Saunders, ‘Afterword’, p. 148. 25 Heidegger’s critique, through all his philosophy, of the Western rational/conscious inclination to ‘presence’ as the mere cognitive practice to determine truth, does however at the same time recognise this process as originally intrinsic in Western culture: Since in all metaphysics from the beginning of Western thought, Being means being present, Being, if it is to be thought in the highest instance, must be thought as pure presence, that is, as the presence that persists, the abiding present, the steadily standing “now”. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, p. 102. 26 Discussing the association between the terms and related meanings of ‘logos’ and ‘interrelation/relationship’ between entities, Massimo Cacciari observes: “Logos implica il rapporto, la relazione: tra soggetto e oggetto, tra uno e molti. Implica percio’ un calcolo. Esclude ogni immediatezza rivelativa.” (“Logos implies a connection, a relationship: between subject and object, between one and many. It therefore implies a calculation. It excludes any revelatory immediacy.”) Massimo Cacciari, L’Arcipelago, Adelphi, Milano, 1997, p. 18 (authors’ translation). 27 In regards to rational attempts to explanation, Heidegger observes that “as soon as human cognition here calls for an explanation, it fails to transcend the world’s nature, and falls short of it.” Martin Heidegger, ‘The Thing’ (1950), in Poetry, Language, Thought, Harper and Row, New York, 1971, p. 180. 28 That of ‘Angst’ (normally translated as ‘anguish’ or ‘anxiety’) is a fundamen tal notion of Heidegger’s philosophy. According to the German philosopher, the

Robin Boyd: spatial continuity 43 condition of ‘Angst’ is intrinsically, existentially, related to our Da-sein, to our being-in-the-world: we must recall that being-in-the-world is the basic constitution of Da-sein. That about which one has Angst is being-in-the-world as such. . . . What Angst is about is completely indefinite. . . . The world has the character of complete insignificance. In Angst we do not encounter this or that thing which, as threatening, could be relevant. Thus neither does Angst “see” a definite “there” and “over here” from which what is threatening approaches. The fact that what is threatening is nowhere characterises what Angst is about. Angst “does not know” what it is about which it is anxious. But “nowhere” does not mean nothing; rather, region in general lies therein, and disclosedness of the world in general for essentially spatial being-in. Therefore, what is threatening cannot approach from a definite direction within nearness, it is already “there” – and yet nowhere. It is so near that it is oppressive and stifles one’s breath – and yet it is nowhere. In what Angst is about, the “it is nothing and nowhere” becomes manifest. The recalcitrance of the innerworldly nothing and nowhere means phenomenally that what Angst is about is the world as such. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, State University of New York Press, Albany, NY, 1996 (originally published by Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen, © 1953), pp. 174, 175. 29 The Renaissance age can be arguably considered as the starting mark of ‘modernity’ based on scientific and technological progression – the invention of perspective inclined to represent reality through accurate dimensions and generally from the seer’s point of view as the subject at-the-centre of the spatial relationships that are indeed represented, is strongly indicative in regards to the points discussed here. In his paper ‘The Age of the World Picture’, Heidegger refers to modernity as the age after the Middle Ages; in some later writings, including Discourse on Thinking, Heidegger refers more in particular to the 17th century as the time from which a sense of objectification (directly associated to subjective self-assertion by human beings) goes hand in hand with the celebration of technological development. See the following excerpts: Modern science simultaneously establishes itself and differentiates itself in its projections of specific object-spheres. . . . The essence of the modern age can be seen in the fact that man frees himself from the bonds of the Middle Ages in freeing himself to himself. But this correct characterisation remains, nevertheless, superficial. . . . Certainly the modern age has, as a consequence of the liberation of the man, introduced subjectivism and individualism. But it remains just as certain that no age before this one has produced a comparable objectivism and that in no age before this has the non-individual, in the form of the collective, come to acceptance as having worth. . . . What is decisive is not that man frees himself to himself from previous obligations, but that the very essence of man itself changes, in that man becomes subject. . . . The word (subjectum) names that-which-lies-before, which, as ground, gathers everything onto itself. This metaphysical meaning of the concept of subject has first of all no special relationship to man and none at all to the I. However, when man becomes the primary and only real subjectum, that means: Man becomes that being upon which all that is, is grounded as regards the manner of its Being and its truth. Man becomes the relational center of that which is as such. . . . The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture. The word “picture” [Bild] now means the structured image [Gebild] that is the creature of man’s producing which represents and sets before. In such producing, man contends for the position in which he can be that particular being who gives the measure and draws up the guidelines for everything that is.

44  Robin Boyd: spatial continuity Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World Picture’, pp. 126, 127, 128, 134. Self-assertive man . . . is the functionary of technology. Not only does he face the Open from outside it; he even turns his back upon the “pure draft” by objectifying the world. . . . The man of the age of technology, by this parting, opposes himself to the Open. This parting is not a parting from, it is a parting against. Martin Heidegger, ‘What Are Poets For?’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, Harper and Row, New York, 1971, p. 116. This radical revolution in outlook has come about in modern philosophy. From this arises a completely new relation of man to the world and his place in it. The world now appears as an object open to the attacks of calculative thought, attacks that nothing is believed able any longer to resist. Nature becomes a gigantic station, an energy source for modern technology and industry. This relation of man to the world as such, in principle a technical one, developed in the seventeenth century first and only in Europe. It long remained unknown in other continents, and it was altogether alien to former ages and histories. Heidegger, ‘Memorial Address’, p. 50. 30 Calling for critical engagement in regards to technology, Heidegger describes “releasement toward things” and “openness to the mystery” as essential conditions of the ‘meditative thinking’ that is encouraged to be exercised in parallel and coexistence with ‘calculative thinking’ (see note 22): The age that is now beginning has been called of late the atomic age. . . . Nuclear physicists everywhere are busy with vast plans to implement the peaceful uses of atomic energy. The great industrial corporations of the leading countries, first of all England, have figured out already that atomic energy can develop into a gigantic business. Through this atomic business a new era of happiness is envisioned. Nuclear science, too, does not stand idly by. It publicly proclaims this era of happiness. Thus in July of this year (1955) at Lake Constance, eighteen Nobel prize winners stated in a proclamation: “Science [and that is modern natural science] is a road to a happier human life.” What is the sense of this statement? Does it spring from reflection? Does it ever ponder on the meaning of the atomic age? No! For if we rest content with this statement of science, we remain as far as possible from a reflective insight into our age. Why? Because we forget to ponder. Because we forget to ask: What is the ground that enabled modern technology to discover and set free new energies in nature? This is due to a revolution in leading concepts which has been going on for the past several centuries, and by which man is placed in a different world. This radical revolution in outlook has come about in modern philosophy. From this arises a completely new relation of man to the world and his place in it. The world now appears as an object open to the attacks of calculative thought, attacks that nothing is believed able any longer to resist. Nature becomes a gigantic station, an energy source for modern technology and industry. This relation of man to the world as such, in principle a technical one, developed in the 17th century first and only in Europe. It long remained unknown in other continents, and it was altogether alien to former ages and histories. The power concealed in modern technology determines the relation of man to that which exists. . . . Is man, then a defenceless and perplexed victim at the mercy of the irresistible superior power of technology? He would be if a man today abandons any intention to pit meditative thinking decisively against merely calculative thinking. . . . Meditative thinking demands of us not to cling one-sidedly to a single idea, nor to run down a one-track course of ideas. Meditative thinking demands of us that we engage ourselves with what at first sight does not go together at all. . . . It would be foolish to attack technology

Robin Boyd: spatial continuity 45 blindly. It would be shortsighted to condemn it as the work of the devil. We depend on technical devices; they even challenge us to even greater advances. But suddenly and unaware we find ourselves so firmly shackled to these technical devices that we fall into bondage with them. Still we can act otherwise. We can use technical devices, and yet with proper use also keep ourselves do free of them, that we may let go of them any time. . . . I would call this comportment towards technology which expresses “yes” and at the same time “no”, by an old word, releasement toward things. Having this comportment we no longer view things only in a technical way. It gives us clear vision and we notice that while the production and use of machines demands of us another relation to things, it is not a meaningless relation. Farming and agriculture, for example, now have turned into a motorised food industry. Thus here, evidently, as elsewhere, a profound change is taking place in man’s relation to nature and to the world. But the meaning that reigns in this change remains obscure. . . . That which shows itself and at the same time withdraws is the essential trait of what we call the mystery. I call the comportment which enables us to keep open to the meaning hidden in technology, openness to the mystery. Releasement toward things and openness to the mystery belong together. They grant us the possibility of dwelling in the world in a totally different way. They promise us a new ground and foundation upon which we can stand and endure in the world of technology without being imperilled by it. . . . Yet releasement toward things and openness to the mystery never happen to themselves. They do not befall us accidentally. Both flourish only through persistent, courageous thinking. Heidegger, ‘Memorial Address’, pp. 49, 50, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56. 31 One typical example of straightforward construction detail is represented by the rather simple nailing of the ceiling lining to the cables in his house in South Yarra, despite the rather experimental solution of the suspended steel cables supporting the roof. 32 Robin Boyd, ‘Engineering of Excitement’, The Architectural Review, vol. 124, no. 742, November 1958, p. 308. 33 Robin Boyd, ‘Germany’ (a review of the German Pavilion at the 1967 Mon treal International Exposition), The Architectural Review, vol. 142, no. 846, August 1967, pp. 129 and 135. 34 Australian architectural historian Philip Drew symptomatically describes the façade of Seidler’s Blues Point Tower in Sydney as “a syncopated composition of solids and voids, a salute to Josef Albers’ ‘The City’ (1928) composition”; Philip Drew, ‘The Migration of an Idea 1945–1976’, in Kenneth Frampton, Philip Drew (eds.), Harry Seidler. Four Decades of Architecture, Thames and Hudson, London and New York, 1992, p. 25; also, still in the same book, “the bright colours of the mural wall” mentioned in the description of the Rose Seidler House in Turramurra as painted by Seidler himself (see p. 39) do emblematically reflect Seidler’s “connections with. . . . New York Minimalism in art” (Drew, ibid., p. 30) – among others, the minimalist compositions of Piet Mondrian, who is a consistent reference for the Austrian-born architect based in Sydney. 35 All these architects belong to the same modernist generation of Robin Boyd: Roy Grounds, 1905–81, lived and worked in Melbourne; Harry Seidler, 1923–2006, was an Austrian-born architect who immigrated first to the US and Canada, and later to Sydney, Australia, where he lived and worked since 1948; Peter Muller, 1927–, was born in Adelaide and after his studies moved to Sydney where he is currently living and working; Peter McIntyre, 1927–, was born in Melbourne, where he is currently living and working; Frederick Romberg, 1913–92, was a German architect who immigrated to Melbourne, Australia, in 1938, where he worked and lived since, also spending a considerable part of his life (from 1965 to 1975) in

46  Robin Boyd: spatial continuity Newcastle, NSW, as the foundation Professor of Architecture at the University of Newcastle. 36 Martin Heidegger, ‘. . . . Poetically Man Dwells . . .’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, Harper and Row, New York, 1971, p. 225. 7 “Oneness” as “worlding of world” is a dimension discussed by Heidegger as ration3 ally and logically inexplicable to human beings: Earth and sky, divinities and mortals – being at one with one another of their own accord – belong together by way of the simpleness of the united fourfold. Each of the four mirrors in its own way the presence of the others. Each therewith reflects itself in its own way into its own, within the simpleness of the four. This mirroring does not portray a likeness. The mirroring, lightening each of the four, appropriates their own presencing into simple belonging to one another. Mirroring in this appropriating-lightening way, each of the four plays to each of the others. The appropriative mirroring sets each of the four free into its own, but it binds these free ones into the simplicity of their essential being toward one another. . . . This appropriating mirror-play of the simple onefold of earth and sky, divinities and mortals, we call the world. The world presences by worlding. That means: the world’s worlding cannot be explained by anything else nor can it be fathomed through anything else. This impossibility does not lie in the inability of our human thinking to explain and fathom in this way. Rather, the inexplicable and unfathomable character of the world’s worlding lies in this, that causes and grounds remain unsuitable for the world’s worlding. As soon as human cognition here calls for an explanation, it fails to transcend the world’s nature, and falls short of it. The human will to explain just does not reach to the simpleness of the simple onefold of worlding. The united four are already strangled in their essential nature when we think of them only as separate realities, which are to be grounded in and explained by one another. The unity of the fourfold is the fouring. But the fouring does not come about in such a way that it encompasses the four and only afterward is added to them as that compass. Nor does the fouring exhaust itself in this, that the four, once they are there, stand side by side singly. The fouring, the unity of the four, presences as the appropriating mirror-play of the betrothed, each to the other in simple oneness. The fouring presences as the worlding of world. The mirror-play of world is the round dance of appropriating. Therefore, the round dance does not encompass the four like a hoop. The round dance is the ring that joins while it plays as mirroring. Appropriating, it lightens the four into the radiance of their simple oneness. Radiantly, the ring joins the four, everywhere open to the riddle of their presence. The gathered presence of the mirror-play of the world, joining in this way, is the ringing. In the ringing of the mirror-playing ring, the four nestle into their unifying presence, in which each one retains its own nature. So nestling, they join together, worlding, the world. Heidegger, ‘The Thing’, pp. 179, 180. 38 Ibid. 39 Massimo Cacciari has described Heidegger’s research – and its related sense of wondering – as informed by a condition of eternal “waiting, listening, hoping for”, terms that we are here proposing as highly appropriate to also describe Boyd’s design approach and his inclination to integration of open and built space. In a paper which reviews the book Modern Architecture written by Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co, Cacciari widely refers to Heidegger’s seminal essay ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, observing that the uprooted spirit of the metropolis is not “sterile”, but productive par excellence. It is the definitive rupture of the Subject’s natural-being that permits it the will-to-power over nature. Heidegger knows this. . . . The problem is not with

Robin Boyd: spatial continuity 47 the form of building in itself. What is absent is not the “fitness” of building to spirit, in which case spirit would be foreign to its home. The problem lies in the fact that spirit may no longer dwell – it has become estranged from dwelling. And this is why building cannot “make” the Home (Dimora) “appear” . . . dwelling is being in the Geviert, experiencing dwelling as a fundamental condition of one’s own being, feeling oneself to be a “dweller”. But is it possible to build for “dwellers”? Only “dwellers” can do so. And it is precisely the “dweller” that is absent today. Heidegger limits himself to reconfirming man’s uprootedness in the face of false and useless attempts to recompose him organically, to make him again organism, plant, root. . . . Heidegger says that it is necessary to “learn to dwell”. He keeps listening for the call to dwell. But no god calls. It is rather the present crisis itself that calls. But how can the crisis call to dwell? Heidegger cannot say. . . . There is no doubt that Heidegger keeps listening for the call to dwell. But this listening is just silence. What speaks is not dwelling, but the crisis of dwelling. And its language is critical: to be exact, division, detachment, difference. In illustrating the condition of dwelling, Heidegger describes the difference that divides us from dwelling . . . he tells us of the total impotence of shelters disguised as homes, of cities disguised as places. In Heidegger this critique appears in the form of listening, of waiting. But this wait is recognised to be a priori indefinable. The reasons for our separation from dwelling-building are contained in the overall history of Western thought – in the very translation of Greek tekne into European technique. The representation, the presentation of the present, has been up to this day the fundamental characteristic of thought. Western thought treats being as presence. But where does our thought relegate that which we call presence? Being-present presupposes an “unconcealedness”. In Being conceived as presence a fundamental unconcealedness is in force which, however, Western thought is unable to grasp. . . . But what is building if not the bringing to presence of the fundamental unconcealedness of dwelling? Dwelling and the thinking about the essential origins of being are connected: thinking for dwelling. But this essential origin remains hidden and mysterious for Heidegger – his thought does not reach that far. In addition, history and the destiny of Western thought are moving in the direction of the technique – not in that of production, but in that of scientific productivity. Can a sense of dwelling re-emerge in this destiny, a sense of building as the pro-duction of the unconcealedness of dwelling? In his waiting, Heidegger unmasks all false appeals – but he remains waiting, listening. . . . Heidegger does not call for the construction of homes – he doesn’t criticize, like Spengler, the absence of homes. Instead, he debunks the pretense of calling homes those buildings that are just lodgings or constructions; and debunks the incredible linguistic confusion between lodging and nostalgia for home that constitutes the specific form of architectural ideology. How could Heidegger call for the construction of homes by those who are no longer dwellers? For he knows that this is an essential condition, the fate of contemporary man. But Heidegger, of course, remains waiting, listening, hoping for the call. The essence of dwelling lies in “remaining”, in “staying on” – not in any place, but in a place that provides peace. Dwelling is being-in-peace. . . . Here, not in refuges, not in hidden places, but here, in the unconcealedness itself, lies beingat-home. Shepherds, says Heidegger, dwell in this unconcealedness “outside of the desert of the desolated earth”. . . . But these shepherds are invisible, and the law that they guard, in which the earth stays within the safety of its limits of possibility, is also invisible. Massimo Cacciari, ‘Eupalinos or Architecture’, Oppositions, no. 21, Summer 1980, pp. 107, 108. 40 Martin Heidegger, ‘Art and Space’ (© Die Kunst und der Raum, 1969), in Neil Leach (ed.), Rethinking Architecture, Routledge, London, 1997, p. 121.

48  Robin Boyd: spatial continuity 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. 43 Reinterpreting Kant’s philosophical positions, Massimo Cacciari observes that external objects and self-consciousness do not refer to each other, pointlessly trying to reciprocally “found” themselves or overwhelm each other, but rather constitute an original duality which, precisely as such, excludes any “method” from the Beginning, as well as any “constructive” idea of origination or arkhe . . . there is no other perception but that of objective representations, that is: representations which refer to objects in space. . . . Always and similarly real is the perception from either my imagination, or my dreaming, or my “stumbling” into a judgement, or my scientific experience. In all these cases I do intuit phenomena in space – appearances which are certainly within me, and which, not however, but for this, since this is indeed the nature of our perceiving, appear as effectively “outside” of me. . . . The external sense is within me, as much as all time is within me. It is therefore totally coherent to affirm that the consciousness of me shows at one the existence of objects in space, precisely in the sense that the consciousness of me is both internal and external sense in one: through the representation of myself, I necessarily represent to me also objects (ob-iecta) in space, as if they were outside of me. Massimo Cacciari, Dell’Inizio (On the Beginning), Adelphi, Milano, 1990, pp. 27, 32, 33 (authors’ translation); in the original Italian version, the text says: Oggetto esterno e autocoscienza non si rimandano l’un l’altro, cercando invano reciprocamente di “fondarsi” o sopraffarsi, ma formano una originaria dualità, che, proprio in quanto tale, esclude ogni “metodo” all’Inizio, ogni “costruttiva” idea di principio o di arché . . . non si dà altra percezione se non la percezione di rappresentazioni oggettive, di rappresentazioni, cioè, cui corrisspondono oggetti nello spazio. . . . Altrettanto reale è il perceptum sia che io immagini, sia che io sogni, sia che “inciampi” nel giudicare, sia che compia un’esperienza scientifica. In tutti questi casi, intuisco nello spazio fenomeni, apparenze che sono certamente in me, e che, non tuttavia, ma per questo, poiché questa è la natura stessa del percepire, appaiono come effettivamente “fuori” di me. . . . Come è in me tutto il tempo, così in me è il senso esterno. Dunque, è del tutto coerente affermare che la coscienza di me mostra in uno l’esistenza degli oggetti nello spazio, ma nel senso preciso che la coscienza di me è in uno senso interno ed esterno: rappresentandomi, mi rappresento di necessità anche ob-iecta nello spazio, come fuori di me. 4 Heidegger, ‘The Thing’, p. 180. 4 45 Robin Boyd, Design in Australia with Robin Boyd, television program, ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), 1964. 46 Heidegger, ‘Art and Space’, p. 124. 47 Boyd, Living in Australia, p. 47. 48 Heidegger, ‘Art and Space’, p. 123. 49 The character of Boyd’s grids and modular systems is evocative of the sense of irrationality that according to architectural historian and theoretician Robin Evans informs the theoretical research of Enlightenment architect and teacher Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand (1760–1834), in particular the speculative projects and architectural schemes published in his treatise Précis des leçons d’architecture (1819) which are typically discussed, in a rather simplistic way, as outcomes of a rational/ scientific/mathematical approach; critical of this conventional interpretation, Evans suggests that Durand’s grids and his orthographic projections have exactly the opposite tendency to those of the École Polytechnique mathematicians. . . . Nothing could be less mathematical in spirit. . . . If Durand’s methods are to be described as

Robin Boyd: spatial continuity 49 scientific, rational, mathematical, geometrical, or even methodical, we should recognise that they are degenerately so. And if we are prone to see in these methods a devaluation of art, we ought to acknowledge that they are also a devaluation of science and mathematics. Robin Evans, The Projective Cast, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, and London, 2000 (original ed., 1995), p. 327. 50 Italian contemporary philosopher Vincenzo Vitiello proposes a notion of topological space, according to which “in questo spazio, o meglio: dei tempi degli indefiniti percorsi – in questo spazio in cui pure tutto è già da sempre accaduto – sono tutte le direzioni e tutte le peregrinazioni ‘possibili’: le lontananze si approssimano, le prossimità si allontanano. Hegel è contemporaneo di Agostino; lontano, in altro topos, abita Schelling, contemporaneo di Plotino.” (“In this space of time, or better: in this space of the times of indefinite routes – in this space in which also everything has already always occurred – all directions and wanderings are ‘possible’; distances approximate, proximities distance each other. Hegel is contemporary of Augustine; far, in another topos, lives Schelling, contemporary of Plotinus.”) Vincenzo Vitiello, Elogio dello Spazio, Bompiani, Milano, 1994, p. 59 (authors’ translation). 51 Boyd himself discussed works by the Smithsons and Kazuo Shinohara through several articles – London-based architecture magazine The Architectural Review (for which Boyd was a regular correspondent) was a vehicle for discussing the work of the former, whereas Shinohara’s work was discussed in his book: New Directions in Japanese Architecture, George Braziller, New York, USA, 1968. Boyd was aware of Giancarlo De Carlo’s work; as president of the Australian Institute of Architects, Victorian Chapter, he invited the Italian architect to deliver a public lecture in Melbourne. However, the two never met, as the Melbourne architect was in hospital when De Carlo arrived in Melbourne on 15 October 1971, and unexpectedly died on Saturday the 16th. De Carlo’s lecture was delivered on Monday the 18th, as per the originally agreed program timeline. Fred Williams (1927–82) and John Brack (1920–99) were two Melbourne-based painters, same generation of Boyd. Hugh Buhrich (1911–2004) was a Sydney-based architect who in 1939 immigrated to Australia from Germany; he was exposed to Boyd’s work and writings, but there is no evidence that the two architects ever met. 52 Some of the peers that among others we like to read in empathy with Boyd’s and our design approach include: Mies van der Rohe, Lina Bo Bardi, Adolf Loos, Junya Ishigami, Alvar Aalto, Camillo Sitte, Michael Markham, Sigurd Lewerentz, Gio Ponti, Gunnar Asplund, NMBW, Achille Castiglioni, Lacaton & Vassal, Enzo Mari, Ray and Charles Eames, Merchant Builders, Asnago & Vender, SANAA, Enric Miralles, Heinrich Tessenow, Sergison Bates, Jože Plecˇnik, Peter Willmott, Fernando Tavora, Michel Desvigne, Geoffrey Bawa, muf architecture/art, Aldo van Eyck, Marti Franch, João Vilanova Artigas, Tom Holbrook (5th Studio) and Gabetti & Isola. In specific regards to the latter, we would like to acknowledge the indirect and yet significant influence that Roberto Gabetti (1925–2000), a mentor to one of the authors may have played in predisposing Mauro Baracco towards Boyd. Gabetti was a director of the firm Gabetti & Isola and Professor of Architecture at Turin Polytechnic, located in the capital city of the geographically marginal region of Piedmont, in the north west of Italy, where also Mauro was born, educated and practised as an architect and academic. Retrospectively, it is intriguing and yet somehow natural, that Mauro’s interest for Boyd may have been triggered by Gabetti’s advice, upon his greeting to Mauro relocating to Australia, to “always study and engage with ‘the local’, wherever you are and start anew in the world.” Not only Turin and Melbourne do arguably share, so we believe, degrees of affinity in being deeply regional and local – even ‘parochial’ at times – and yet generously and candidly open to the world, but also we must here acknowledge the highly multidisciplinary approach that, similarly to Boyd, consistently drove Gabetti through

50  Robin Boyd: spatial continuity his design practice and teaching, learning and research activities. Mauro’s memories include ‘architectural’ conversations extremely rich with references and many personal accounts from Gabetti related to the fields of philosophy, literature, arts and above all, botany, among others. 53 In describing and critiquing ‘featurism’ as a modern inclination to heavily rely on – and produce – representations (as forms, objects, ‘things’ in general), Boyd suggests that this may be generated by human incapability, particularly in Australia, to relate in an integrated way to the challenges posed by the vast scale of this country’s landscape: Featurism . . . may be defined as the subordination of the essential whole and the accentuation of selected separate features. Featurism is by no means confined to Australia or to the 20th century, but it flourishes more than ever at this place and time. Perhaps the explanation is that man, sensing that the vastness of the landscape will mock any object that his handful of fellows can make here, avoids anything that might be considered a challenge to nature. The greater and fiercer the natural background, the prettier and pettier the artificial foreground; this way there are no unflattering comparisons, no loss of face. Or perhaps it is simply that man makes his immediate surroundings petty in an attempt to counteract the overwhelming scale of the continent, as man always in building has sought maximum counteraction to apply in the artistic approach. Robin Boyd, The Australian Ugliness, 1960, p. 9. 54 Mauro Baracco, Louise Wright, ‘Boyd in Melbourne’, Itinerary no. 149, Domus, no. 808, October 1998. 55 See Mauro Baracco (ed.), Tree Sprawl – Consolidation and Expansion of Open Vegetated Space; Projects in the Urban Territory of Merri Creek, Melbourne, School of Architecture and Design, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, 2011. 56 In relation to this project, which in its early phases was initially called All Change, see the following bibliographic background and websites: Mauro Baracco (ed.), All Change, School of Architecture and Design, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, 2012; ‘Regenerated Towns in Regenerated Nature’, interview by Ricky Ricardo to Mauro Baracco, Landscape Architecture Australia, no. 146, 2015, pp. 30–32; http:// www.rmitallchanges.weebly.com; http://www.townsandnature.com. 57 Gary Presland, The Place for a Village – How Nature Has Shaped the City of Melbourne, Museum Victoria, Melbourne, Australia, 2008. 58 Named after the Bradley sisters Eileen Burton (1911–76) and Joan Burton (1916– 82), who restored what is now called ‘Bradley Head’ in Sydney Harbour. For their biography see http://adb.anu.au/biography/bradley-eileen-burton-9566. 59 Mel Dodd, ‘Garden House’, Architecture Australia, September/October 2015, p. 71. 60 Heidegger, ‘Memorial Address’, p. 50. See also note 30. 61 Boyd, Living in Australia, p. 15. 62 David Saunders writes: “I have been told by a one-time client of Robin Boyd’s that it was a pleasure, but something of a puzzle, how long and relaxed the conversations were which preceded the design.” Saunders, ‘Afterword’, p. 149. 63 The Age RVIA-Royal Victorian Small Homes Service took place from 1947 to 1961. Robin Boyd directed the program from 1947 to 1954, with the exception of part of 1951 when he travelled overseas. High-standard designs for houses were produced by some of the best architects of that time and published in The Age – each week Boyd would write an article. From 1954 to 1961 the program was directed by Melbourne architect Neil Clerehan. See also Neil Clerehan, ‘The Age RVIA Small Homes Service’, Transition, no. 38, 1992 (monographic issue on Robin Boyd), pp. 56–69.

Bibliography

Banham, Reyner, ‘The New Brutalism’, The Architectural Review, no. 118, December 1955 Banham, Reyner, The New Brutalism, The Architectural Press, London, 1966 Baracco, Mauro, Coexistence of Rational Definiteness and Irrational Oneness: An Investigation of Robin Boyd’s Architecture and Theoretical Approach through a Heideggerian Perspective, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, 2010 Baracco, Mauro (ed.), Tree Sprawl – Consolidation and Expansion of Open Vegetated Space; Projects in the Urban Territory of Merri Creek, Melbourne, School of Architecture and Design, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, 2011 Baracco, Mauro (ed.), All Change, School of Architecture and Design, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, 2012 Baracco, Mauro; Wright, Louise, ‘Boyd in Melbourne’, Domus, no. 808, October 1998 Benedetti, Carla, Pasolini contro Calvino, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino, 1998 Boyd, Robin, Victorian Modern: One Hundred and Eleven Years of Modern Architecture in Victoria, Australia, Architectural Students’ Society of the Royal Victorian Institute of Architects, Melbourne, 1947 Boyd, Robin, ‘Mornington Peninsula’, Architecture, vol. 38, no. 4, October–December 1950 Boyd, Robin, ‘The Vanishing Gumtree: Have You Ever Tried to Find One in the Suburbs?’, The Age, 5 April 1950 Boyd, Robin, ‘A New Eclecticism?’, The Architectural Review, vol. 110, no. 657, September 1951 Boyd, Robin, Australia’s Home, Penguin, Melbourne, 1968 (original ed., Melbourne University Press, 1952) Boyd, Robin, ‘The Functional Neurosis’, The Architectural Review, vol. 119, no. 710, February 1956 Boyd, Robin, ‘The Search for Pleasingness’, Progressive Architecture, vol. 38, no. 4, April 1957 Boyd, Robin, ‘Engineering of Excitement’, The Architectural Review, vol. 124, no. 742, November 1958 Boyd, Robin, The Australian Ugliness, F. W. Cheshire, Melbourne, 1960 Boyd, Robin, a response to ‘Six Questions on Italian Architecture’, in Quindici anni di architettura italiana (Fifteen years of Italian architecture), a monographic issue of Casabella, no. 261, May 1961 Boyd, Robin, Kenzo Tange, George Braziller, New York, 1962 Boyd, Robin, The Walls Around Us: The Story of Australian Architecture, F. W. Cheshire, Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney, 1962

52  Bibliography Boyd, Robin, The New Architecture, Longmans, Melbourne, 1963 Boyd, Robin, ‘Under Tension’, The Architectural Review, vol. 134, no. 801, November 1963 Boyd, Robin, Design in Australia with Robin Boyd, television program, ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), 1964 Boyd, Robin, The Puzzle of Architecture, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1965 Boyd, Robin, ‘The State of Australian Architecture’, Architecture in Australia, vol. 56, no. 3, June 1967 Boyd, Robin, ‘The Sad End of New Brutalism’, The Architectural Review, vol. 142, no. 845, July 1967 Boyd, Robin, ‘Germany’ (a review of the German Pavilion at the 1967 Montreal International Exposition), The Architectural Review, vol. 142, no. 846, August 1967 Boyd, Robin, Artificial Australia, the Boyer Lectures 1967, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Sydney, 1968 Boyd, Robin, New Directions in Japanese Architecture, George Braziller, New York, 1968 Boyd, Robin, Living in Australia, Pergamon Press, Sydney, 1970 Boyd, Robin, ‘The Neighbourhood’, in Ian McKay; Robin Boyd; Hugh Stretton; John Mant (eds.), Living and Partly Living, Thomas Nelson (Australia), Melbourne, 1971 Boyd, Robin, The Great Great Australian Dream, Pergamon Press, Sydney, 1972 Burns, Karen; Edquist, Harriet (eds.), Robin Boyd: The Architect as Critic, Transition Publishing, Melbourne, 1989 Button, John (ed.), Look Here! Considering the Australian Environment, F. W. Cheshire, Melbourne, 1968 Cacciari, Massimo, ‘Eupalinos or Architecture’, Oppositions, no. 21, Summer 1980 Cacciari, Massimo, Dell’Inizio, Adelphi, Milano, 1990 Cacciari, Massimo, Architecture and Nihilism: On the Philosophy of Modern Architecture, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT and London, 1993 Cacciari, Massimo, Geo-filosofia dell’Europa, Adelphi, Milano, 1994 Cacciari, Massimo, ‘Res aedificatoria. Il “classico” di Mies van der Rohe’, Casabella, no. 629, December 1995, (originally published in Paradosso, no. 9, 1994) Cacciari, Massimo, L’Arcipelago, Adelphi, Milano, 1997 Cacciari, Massimo, ‘To Dwell, to Think’, Casabella, no. 662/663, December 1998/ January 1999 Cacciari, Massimo, ‘The Shards of the All’, Casabella, no. 684/685, December 2000/ January 2001 Cacciari, Massimo, ‘Nomads in Prison’, Casabella, no. 705, November 2002 Cacciari, Massimo, La citta’, Pazzini Editore, Villa Verucchio (Rimini), 2006 (original ed., 2004) Dodd, Mel, ‘Garden House’, Architecture Australia, September/October 2015 Edquist, Harriet (ed.), Robin Boyd, a monographic issue of Transition, no. 38, 1992 Evans, Robin, The Projective Cast, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA and London, 2000 (original ed., 1995) Frampton, Kenneth; Philip, Drew, Harry Seidler: Four Decades of Architecture, Thames and Hudson, London and New York, 1992 Hamann, Conrad, Modern Architecture in Melbourne: The Architecture of Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, 1927–1971, PhD thesis, Visual Art Department, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, July 1978 Hamann, Conrad, ‘Against the Dying of the Light: Robin Boyd and Australian Architecture’, Transition, no. 29, 1989

Bibliography 53 Heidegger, Martin, Discourse on Thinking, Harper & Row Publishers, New York, 1966 (original ed., Gelassenheit, 1959) Heidegger, Martin, ‘Memorial Address’, in Discourse on Thinking (© Gelassenheit, 1959), Harper and Row, New York, 1966 Heidegger, Martin, What Is Called Thinking? Harper & Row Publishers, New York, 1968 (original ed., Was Heisst Denken? 1954) Heidegger, Martin, Poetry, Language, Thought, Harper & Row Publishers, New York, 1971 Heidegger, Martin, ‘The Thing’ (paper first delivered on the 6th June 1950; first published in 1951), in Poetry, Language, Thought, Harper & Row Publishers, New York, 1971 Heidegger, Martin, ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’ (paper first delivered on the 5th August 1951), in Poetry, Language, Thought, Harper & Row Publishers, New York, 1971 Heidegger, Martin, ‘. . . . Poetically Man Dwells . . .’ (paper first delivered on 6 October 1951; first published in 1954), in Poetry, Language, Thought, Harper & Row Publishers, New York, 1971 Heidegger, Martin, ‘The Age of the World Picture’ (paper first delivered on the 9th June 1938), in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, Harper & Row Publishers, New York, 1977 Heidegger, Martin, ‘Letter on Humanism’ (original ed., Brief über den Humanismus, 1947), in David Farrell Krell (ed.), Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, Harper & Row Publishers, New York, 1977, pp. 189–242 Heidegger, Martin, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, Harper & Row Publishers, New York, 1977 Heidegger, Martin, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ (paper first delivered on the 18th November 1953), in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, Harper & Row Publishers, New York, 1977 Heidegger, Martin, ‘Science and Reflection’ (paper first delivered on the 4th August 1953), in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, Harper & Row Publishers, New York, 1977 Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, State University of New York Press, Albany, NY, 1996 (original ed., Sein und Zeit, Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen, 1927) Heidegger, Martin, ‘Art and Space’ (paper first delivered on the 3rd October 1964; original ed., Die Kunst und der Raum, 1969), in Neil Leach (ed.), Rethinking Architecture, Routledge, London, 1997, pp. 121–124 McKay, Ian; Boyd, Robin; Stretton, Hugh; Mant, John, Living and Partly Living, Thomas Nelson (Australia), Melbourne, 1971 McWhorter, Ladelle; Stenstad, Gail (eds.), Heidegger and the Earth: Essays in Environmental Philosophy, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, Buffalo, London, 2009 Nelson, Eric S., ‘Responding to Heaven and Earth: Daoism, Heidegger and Ecology’, Environmental Philosophy, vol. 1, no. 2, Fall 2004 Presland, Gary, The Place for a Village – How Nature Has Shaped the City of Melbourne, Museum Victoria, Melbourne, 2008 Ricardo, Ricky, interview with Mauro Baracco, Landscape Architecture Australia, no. 146, 2015 Saunders, David, ‘Afterword’, in Robin Boyd (ed.), Living in Australia, Pergamon Press, Sydney, 1970, pp. 147–152 Serle, Geoffrey, Robin Boyd: A Life, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1995

54  Bibliography Tafuri, Manfredo; Dal Co, Francesco, Modern Architecture, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York, 1979 (original ed., Architettura Contemporanea, 1976) Vitiello, Vincenzo, Elogio dello Spazio, Bompiani, Milano, 1994 Wescott, Geoff, Back to Basics; Breakthrough Proposals for the Australian Environment, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia, 2009 Winton, Tim, Island Home; A Landscape Memoir, Hamish Hamilton (Penguin Books), Australia, 2015

Part 2

Robin Boyd Selected works

Introduction The projects documented in the following section are a selection from Robin Boyd’s body of work. As examples of different types and scales, mainly domestic, this group of works has been selected as a collection that demonstrates the concept of spatial continuity. That most of the selection is domestic architecture is reflective of the most recurrent type of commission – private residential buildings, usually in the form of single houses – that Boyd received in his career. Despite the attempt, at the time of his unexpected death, to gain more public commissions or at least larger domestic projects, Boyd certainly did not disdain his continuous involvement with the design of the single house type; this was in fact positively embraced and consistently explored as a means to redefine the urban conditions of Australia through the densification of the built fabric and the investigation of spatial continuity between the architectural and natural environments. All projects are documented in their original situation since one of the essential intents of the investigation process was to test the theoretical framework and its related enquiries against the spatial conditions of the architectural and landscape design as originally conceived and envisaged by Boyd. The projects have been entirely redrawn from archive and bibliographic sources, and surveyed through visits undertaken in the years since 2005 – all the works have been visited except for the demolished Southgate Fountain. It is left to the photographs and their combination of original and more recent shots – the proportion between them varies from project to project – to show changes, additions and modifications that may have occurred throughout the years. The potentiality and flexibility of the projects, in particular their capability of acquiring further unpredicted connotations through the growing, ageing and gradual transformation of both the designed and natural landscapes, has also been investigated and documented by representing the current conditions (trees, vegetation and other components of the gardens, open and surrounding natural areas in general) as an integral development from the original state of the time of the design completion.

56  Robin Boyd: selected works The types of drawings – site maps, plans, sections, elevations and 3-D views – and their laconic graphic style intend to test the spatial definitions, planning layout and volumetric combinations of Boyd’s projects against the theoretical framework discussed in the initial part of the book. In particular, the diagrammatic nature and reduced expression of these line drawings – their inclination to resist over-expression – are applied as a graphic device to document the various elements of the project (interior, exterior, architectural, infrastructural and landscape spaces) as equal parts of the whole, in absence of any distinctive sense of hierarchy between them. This graphic approach, abstracting the project into its most essential traits, has been tested as an appropriate medium to reveal the sense of spatial continuity that at different levels interrelates the individual parts into a whole. The drawings, normally plans and sections, usually shown in historical books and magazines of Boyd’s work up to now are exclusively focussed on the formal and spatial solutions of the building, with no documentation of the existing site and the surrounding context, floating in the white of the page in an aphoristic way; merely communicating the internal sense of spatial continuity, they do not convey the further levels of correlation that link architecture, landscape, urban context and natural environment. Boyd’s projects have never been publicly shown with this level of comprehensiveness – his work has been so far consistently published in bits and pieces and generally through scattered papers and articles, at the most summarised in chronological lists, but never really described and illustrated through more comprehensive types of analysis and investigation.

1  Boyd House 1 1947

Figure 1.1. Exterior view from garden, 1947. Photograph, Peter Wille, Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria.

1 Boyd House 1 1947

The first house that Boyd designed for his family is located in the suburb of Camberwell, just over 10 kilometres east from Melbourne’s city, on the west side of a ‘left-over’ wedge of land from the subdivision of some larger parkland originally incised by a creek. As a result, the site is confined behind the back of some adjacent sites and the house is ‘squeezed’ between their back fences and a gully of the creek that used to run from the parkland on the north. The house is further distanced from the west edge of the gully to avoid possible structural problems related to land erosion, and to comply with the municipal set-back regulations to neighbouring properties. Both its footprint and placement within the block are a direct response to the challenging existing conditions of the site. The outcome is a long and narrow building that is less than four metres wide along its entire length, with a “plan that is roughly the same as that of a railway train”.1 Initially designed for a family of three (Robin, his wife Patricia and their elder daughter), the house was enlarged a few years later (1951) with the addition of some new volumes to accommodate two more children born while Robin and his family were living there, before relocating in the late 1950s to a new house.2 The new volumes were added to both ends, and the original pergola/carport was partially enclosed and transformed into a study/hall space to link the living/dining area to both the sitting room and guest room. The east half of the original pergola/carport was retained as a veranda to screen the study’s glazing and service the entry area. The new volume added to the south end extends the night-time area from two to three bedrooms – one of these is accommodated in a narrow space that is equipped with a dressing bay defined by two wardrobes at one end, and a venetian blind at the other to provide a permeable separation from the living/dining area. This early work clearly reveals some of the essential conditions that accompany Boyd throughout his research and design approach; for instance, a sense of potentiality and flexibility goes hand in hand with the dimensions of indefiniteness, permeability and indivisibility that ‘con-fuse’ all its various moments into a continuum. The notion of spatial continuity investigated in Boyd’s work is anticipated here in many interesting ways: from a number of undescriptive rooms able to provide variable types of occupation (the study/hall, the loft-like space including sitting room and guest area, the bedroom next to the living

Boyd House 1 1947 59 room transformable into an additional day-time area when “by day the bed slides under the cupboard division to the dressing bay”),3 to the many separations by means of furniture elements rather than partition walls or doors (the see-through shelving to mediate the two different levels of the entry and the lower living room, the two wardrobes to delimit the dressing room, the cupboard between the sitting room and the guest area in the north volume and the suspended fireplace that freely floats in this same space, the curtain between the sitting room and the hall/study), to the lack of ‘servicing’ areas (all linking corridor areas are also spaces for domestic occupation, and the circulation between the kitchen, laundry and bathroom does not have an end point, but rather traces a continuous loop between these areas and the adjacent flexible bedroom). The informality of this house is indicative of Boyd’s distancing from the notions of ‘creation’, ‘invention’ and ‘innovation’ that are promoted through the sense of predetermination that typically informs many mainstream modernist approaches. The flexible and undetermined spaces, which spatially blur into each other, released from any sense of compositional hierarchy, are mirrored by the informality of the footprint and look of the building, both generated – rather than ‘created’ – by responding to the existing site conditions. The inclination of the bedrooms’ windows, far from being a gratuitous invention, is the means of a more intimate relationship with the existing vegetated gully that lies below; it projects the building towards the natural environment of its site, seeking a state of co-belongingness between architecture and landscape. The house is now in poor condition (not documented here) following the demolition of many of its interiors and some major transformations.

Notes 1 ‘House at Camberwell’, Architecture and Arts, no. 13, August 1954, p. 29. 2 See Boyd House 2 in this book. 3 ‘House near Melbourne’, The Architectural Review, vol. 108, no. 647, November 1950, p. 316.

Figure 1.2. Context plan 1951 and original geomorphic conditions (left). Figure 1.3. Site plan, 1951. Figure 1.4. Long section, 1947. Figure 1.5. Floor plan, 1947.

Figure 1.6. Aerial view from north east. Figure 1.7. Long section, 1951. Figure 1.8. Floor plan, 1951.

Figure 1.9. Interior view towards entry, 1947. Photograph, Peter Wille, Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria.

Figure 1.10.  Pergola and outdoor area, 1947. Photograph, Mark Strizic, 1928–2012, © Courtesy of the Estate of the Artist.

Figure 1.11. View of façade, 1947. Photograph, Mark Strizic, 1928–2012, © courtesy the Estate of the Artist.

2  Gillison House 1952

Figure 2.1. View from garden to main façade, 1952. Photograph, Mark Strizic, 1928–2012, © courtesy the Estate of the Artist.

2 Gillison House 1952

This house, designed for Australian journalist and writer Douglas Gillison and his family, is located in the Melbourne suburb of Balwyn, 12 kilometres east of the city. It sits unfenced towards the street within a corner site, and is screened by trees that form a thick natural band relating to the public park and gardens that extend across the road. The rectangular footprint of the house does not generate a rectangular volume; rather the two rooms located on the east half of the first floor, perceived in the building’s silhouette as individual elements that arise from the horizontality of the roof, pop up and hover above the rest of the volume. These two rooms – an additional living space upstairs for the younger members of the family, and the personal study of Douglas Gillison – are separated by a void which incises the long north façade and interrupts its continuity, making space for the entry area at the ground floor and a suspended outdoor bridge above it that connects the intentionally detached study to the rest of the house. The remaining spaces at the ground level include day-time areas in the east half and night-time rooms in the west half. The latter comprise one large and three single bedrooms, in addition to a bathroom, toilet and a corridor that links the carport to the interior spaces; the former comprise an entry hall, living room, dining area and kitchen spatially flowing into each other, all distributed around a partition wall and the staircase. The whole façade wrapping around the house is based on square modules. Some of these are totally open and transparent, enabling a reciprocal dialogue between indoor and outdoor spaces through the glazing of floor-to-ceiling windows reinforced by diagonal framing; others, in contrast, are close and impermeable, almost blank, marked by horizontal slit windows. The north sides of the two living rooms and all bedrooms, together with the east edge of the dining area, are overtly released towards the garden, which provides a successful buffer, in scale and density of vegetation, to the surrounding streets. The short sides and back of the house, together with the study, are differently informed by a strong sense of impenetrability. Isolated and ‘secluded’ from the rest of the family’s activities, the study is characterised by an introverted, monastic aura, allowing the view “through just one slit window at the eye level of a writer at the desk behind it”.1



Gillison House 1952 67

The entry void cutting through the façade is a hinge; it is a connector between the outdoor and indoor spaces, but also the preparation to an area – the entry hall – that distributes and separates the different parts of the project – nighttime wing, day-time rooms and additional spaces upstairs – without physically compartmentalising them. The void pierced by the bridge, the outcome of two modules left unbuilt, is a negative space that although physically unbounded and unmeasurable is determined by the modularity of the grid that informs this house and its façade in particular. Hugging each other with no sense of hierarchy, the built and empty modules of this house – the carport can be included in the latter category – are conventionally readable as elements of a system, individual repetitive components of a grid, and yet suggest a sense of spatial continuum that defeats logical definition. Some later modifications – the enclosing of the void and inclusion of the study within the house’s volume, and the addition of a room to the back of the living space on the top floor – prevent the full enjoyment of the paradoxical explorations of spatial continuity that Boyd proposes in this work; however the changes do confirm the sense of potential that inherently informs this project and the flexibility of its grid.

Note 1   Robin Boyd, Living in Australia, Pergamon Press, Sydney, 1970, p. 24.

Figure 2.2. Context plan. Figure 2.3. Site plan. Figure 2.4. First floor plan. Figure 2.5.  Floor plan.

Figure 2.6. View from garden. Figure 2.7. Short section. Figure 2.8. North façade.

Figure 2.9. Current interior view towards north east dematerialised corner. Figure 2.10. Current external view of single storey north façade. Photographs, Mauro Baracco.

Figure 2.11. View of north east corner, 1952. Photograph, Mark Strizic, 1928–2012, © courtesy the Estate of the Artist.

Figure 2.12. Current view of volumes from north. Figure 2.13. Current view of volumes from north east. Photographs, Mauro Baracco.

Figure 2.14. Current view of south east corner. Photograph, Mauro Baracco.

Figure 2.15. View of bridge, 1952. Photograph, Peter Wille, Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria.

3  Manning Clark House 1952

Figure 3.1. Current view of double height volume. Photograph, Trevor Creighton.

3 Manning Clark House 1952

This house, located in Canberra in the suburb of Forrest, four kilometres south of the core of the city’s central district, was designed for Australian historian Manning Clark, his wife Dymphna and their six children – they were only four when the Clarks moved in, and for reasons relating to their age difference “it was rare for the whole family to live for extended periods together” in this building.1 The site, two-thirds of an acre, is located on the edge of public parkland bound by Tasmania Circle. The latter, in conjunction with the surrounding outer Arthur Circle and together with other circular nodal points, is a key figure from the urban plan for Canberra that was designed in 1911, and further defined in following years, by American architects Walter Burley and Marion Mahony Griffin. On the high side of a site that slopes gently down towards north, the house is serviced by a driveway that leads to a detached volume originally used as a garage but later transformed into a flat. This has been inhabited in various ways from quick visitor stays to longer tenancies undertaken by research assistants and collaborators involved with the research of both Manning, Professor of History at the Australian National University, and Dymphna, a lecturer in German and distinguished scholar at the same university.2 The carport extending from the house’s roof is a related outcome of the garage conversion; it is more easily reachable in comparison to the awkward manoeuvring that was originally required with driving into the original garage. Further west, an outdoor zone is formally laid out in front of the main building as a negative space of it. The entry, shaded by a densely vegetated pergola of ornamental grape on top of an introductory courtyard, leads to a fully glazed volume, a vestibulum/ gallery space that ushers to the different interior parts of the house, and at the same time integrates the surrounding indoor and outdoor spaces. Avoiding expressive architectural features on both its sides, and relying instead on the mass and density of foliage that characterises the south pergola and the presence of plants in the north courtyard, the extremely contracted space of this entry hall is informed by the desire to dematerialise the physical limits between enclosed and open space. The sense of spatial contraction experienced in this glazed filamentous volume, together with the consistent presence of green and

Manning Clark House 1952 75 plants which climb over the trellises onto the house’s façade, are evidence of a design approach that is critical of the rational conventions that make us normally perceive separations and hierarchies between inside and outside, foreground and background, architecture and landscape. Three different zones pivot around this entry space: the day-time areas on the east side, including a kitchen, dining room and living room; the nighttime areas on the west side, including one main and three smaller bedrooms, a bathroom and a toilet; and Manning Clark’s own personal study, sitting on the top of the entry volume to which it is connected by a steep ladder and from which it cantilevers towards both south and north. The monastic feeling of the interior with white-painted bagged brick walls contributes to the undifferentiated feeling that pervades this house. Unified in look by this white undescriptive finishing, the interior rooms can be used beyond their specifically assigned function – the fact they are all provided with bookshelves is indicative of the possibility to rest and work at the same time. The house, concealed from the street, is open instead behind the fence to absorb the surrounding landscape: the floor-to-ceiling windows of the living room and entry space draw the garden inside; the window of Manning Clark’s study, through a view that is further ‘directed’ by an awning added later with a rather telescopic air, projects this building towards the urban landscape of Canberra and its surrounding natural environment.3 The new Parliament House’s flag-mast, completed in 1988, three years before Manning Clark’s death, is part of a panoramic silhouette that also includes Mount Ainslie and Black Mountain, respectively located on the east and west sides of this spire. In step with the Griffins and their vision of a city in a continuous dialogue with the surrounding natural landscape,4 Boyd seeks a state of symbiotic ‘con-fusion’ between the built elements of this house and the natural presences that are around and beyond it.

Notes 1 See Roslyn Russell, ‘Manning Clark House: A Personal Recollection’, in Trevor Creighton, Peter Freeman, Roslyn Russell, Manning Clark House: Reflections, Manning Clark House, Forrest, ACT, 2002, p. 23. 2 Dymphna was involved with the editing, proofreading and research activities of her husband. 3 Conservation architect and planner Peter Freeman observes that about four years after moving into the house, Dymphna wrote to Boyd to explain that the north-facing rooms allowed too much winter sun into those rooms, and particularly into Manning’s attic study. In response, Boyd designed some cantilevered awning shades to the northern windows, which remain to this day. Peter Freeman, ‘Manning Clark House: An Architect’s View’, in Trevor Creighton, Peter Freeman, Roslyn Russell, Manning Clark House: Reflections, p. 38. 4 See in particular the plans and perspective views drawn by Marion Mahony Griffin in 1911, currently held by the Australian National Archives.

Figure 3.2. Context plan. Figure 3.3. Site plan. Figure 3.4. First floor plan. Figure 3.5. Ground floor plan.

Figure 3.6. View from east from garden. Figure 3.7. Site section. Figure 3.8. Long section. Figure 3.9. Short section.

Figure 3.10. Current view of glazed link from southern courtyard. Figure 3.11. Current view of glazed link and stair to study. Photographs, Trevor Creighton.

Figure 3.12.  Current view of west façade. Photograph, Mauro Baracco.

Figure 3.13. Current view of living room through to glazed link. Photograph, Trevor Creighton.

Figure 3.14. Current view of double height volume from north. Photograph, Mauro Baracco.

4  Finlay House 1952–53

Figure 4.1. View from garden to main façade, 1953. Photograph, Mark Strizic, 1928–2012, © courtesy the Estate of the Artist.

4 Finlay House 1952–53

This small house, designed for Keith Finlay, is located in Melbourne’s outer suburb of Warrandyte, along Kangaroo Ground Road, 30 kilometres north east from the city. Similar to other houses designed by Boyd in this area, it is surrounded by native vegetation and occupies a corner of a large site – the side of a gully that slopes towards south west. The density of the existing vegetation along the back façade and the way it sits beneath the road level, shelters the building, reinforcing its character of ‘isolated pavilion’ in the bush. This house survived the fierce bushfire in 1962 that destroyed many buildings in this area, including the first Wright House by Boyd built in the early 1950s and later replaced by him with different design solutions and materials, 200 metres up the road. The square shape plan, of approximately 10 × 10 m, is subdivided – virtually more than physically – into sixteen smaller squares (of approx. 2.5 × 2.5 m each). The partitions, running along the perimeters of some of these square modules, the columns, either concealed within the partitions or free, and the roof supports above them, are the linear elements that trace this grid. The simplicity of this idea generates a plan layout as a combination of modules, each of them dimensioned in such a way to guarantee appropriate spaces for inhabitation and circulation in every possible solution – from restrained one module configurations applied to a couple of areas to larger combinations: a 5 × 5 m living area; a 2.5 × 7.5 m bedroom, including the wardrobe/utility area; a 2.5 × 2.5 m kitchen area; a 2.5 × 2.5 m service area accommodating both bathroom and a separated laundry; a 2.5 × 10 m indoor/outdoor area accommodating a covered fly-screened porch/veranda; and a 2.5 × 7.5 m external covered carport area. This tartan-like layout is informed by a strong sense of potentiality. The feeling is that the house could easily expand in future, if necessary, through the addition of further square modules that, identical in dimension and similar in character to the current sixteen ones (nine indoor, three outdoor and four indoor/outdoor), may accommodate different functions without compromising the original layout rules. At another level, the sense of potentiality is expressed by the flexibility that informs the various possible combinations that determine the use of the spaces – the four module square living area is effectively larger when combined with the kitchen ‘corner’ in its immediate unseparated proximity; furthermore, this same living area doubles up in dimension when considered in conjunction with the extra living and sitting area provided by the four-module rectangular shape of the fly-screened covered porch; alternatively,

Finlay House 1952–53 83 the latter, implementing its own intrinsic quality of ambiguous semi-enclosed indoor/outdoor space, can also occasionally provide extra bedroom area for ‘sleepovers in the open’ during hot summer nights. The potentiality of this house can be indirectly related to architectural references analogous in character and design approach. Chronologically and compositionally this project sits in between the ideas of an ‘open plan around a core’ and an ‘open plan based on modular repetition’; Mies van der Rohe’s 1945–50 Farnsworth House is a significant modernist example of the former idea, while Yoshinobu Ashihara’s 1963 studios at Musashino Art University – a project discussed by Boyd1 – and many other works of both Metabolist and Radical traditions are pertinent late-modernist examples of the latter. This house is essentially, in form and spirit, a tent – a tent in the bush that, like all good tents and camping grounds, is respectful of the natural environment that harbours it, lightly sitting in its natural landscape. It is unobtrusive, yet it does not try to disappear or be mimetic with the landscape. It accepts nature and yet is “visibly anti-natural”.2 The stained green concrete slab floor of the indoor spaces and the stone paving of the fly-screened porch are examples of this approach; they both play with nature – through colour and matter – confirming at the same time their own grain of artificiality. The embracing of the surrounding landscape and its horizons is made possible by large sliding glass doors that open from the living and bedroom areas to the fly-screened porch. The expanse of the south west external landscape absorbs the relatively small dimension of the indoor domestic environment, releasing it from the tightness of its volumes and virtually allowing them to decompress into the large outdoor space beyond the flyscreen. In its tent likeness and analogous light and impermanent architectural infrastructure, this house has simple formal, technical and spatial solutions that rely on straightforward combinations of modular and serial constructive elements, and flexible inhabitation as well: the fly-screened area in front of the indoor volumes, the W-shape roof with two valleys directly leading into the rain-water tanks, and the open plan capable to adjustably accommodate various combinations of different functional areas. Significant changes, not documented in this book, have occurred over time, including extensive additions to the north west side and the enclosing of the porch through the replacement of the original flyscreen with glass panels. Although these modifications are not particularly in tune with Boyd’s light and minimal approach, the original 10 × 10 m footprint shape is still readable in its entirety – it accommodates an open space in which entry, living, dining and kitchen areas are integrated in a spatial configuration that is larger than the original, as both the fly-screened porch and the carport have been enclosed, and the bedroom area has been relocated, together with more new bedrooms, into the added volumes. The sense of openness and lightness of this tent-like house has survived.

Notes 1 Robin Boyd, New Directions in Japanese Architecture, George Braziller, New York, 1968, pp. 82–89. 2 Conrad Hamann, Chris Hamann, ‘Anger and the New Order: Some Aspects of Robin Boyd’s Career’, Transition, vol. 2, no. 3/4, September/December 1981, p. 30.

Figure 4.2. Context plan. Figure 4.3. Site plan. Figure 4.4. Floor plan showing grid. Figure 4.5. Floor plan.

Figure 4.6. View from north (road). Figure 4.7. View from south. Figure 4.8. Site section. Figure 4.9. South west elevation.

Figure 4.10. Current view of south corner. Figure 4.11. Current view of north east façade. Photographs, Aaron Pocock.

Figure 4.12. Current view of south west façade. Figure 4.13. Current view from interior through south west façade. Photographs, Aaron Pocock.

5  Fenner House 1953–54

Figure 5.1. View from east towards entry, 1954. Photograph, Peter Wille, Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria.

5 Fenner House 1953–54

Located in Canberra, in the suburb of Red Hill, five kilometres south of the city’s central district, this house was designed for Australian microbiologist Frank Fenner, his medical scientist wife Bobbie Roberts and their daughter. Placed diagonally within a generous corner site, the house is set back from the street. Conceived and built in the same years as the Manning Clark House located half a kilometre further north, this project is similarly informed by a plan layout consisting of an entry space as an interconnecting element between two other sites on the north and south sides which respectively accommodate the day-time and night-time areas. Differently though, the footprint of this building reveals a more distinctive sense of contraction/expansion between its three connected parts. In the Manning Clark House the two external courts immediately adjacent to the entry volume are incorporated with the rest of the building through overhanging pergolas that run in continuity with the external perimeter of the house. Here, instead, the clear tripartition of the building into rather individual volumes tends to more decidedly ‘fragment’ the house, contributing to a sense of spatial contraction and expansion that is experienced while circulating throughout volumes of various scales and with differing ways of relating to their immediate outsides. Moreover, the transparency of the entry hall adds a further layer of complexity and ambiguity in enabling the occupants to feel released/expanded towards the outside and yet at the same time contracted within the smaller dimensions that define both the width and height of this area in comparison to the other rooms of the house. This relational and interconnecting volume is twice permeable. Together with the physical permeability, the total transparency and yet physical materiality of this volume makes it an ‘absent presence’, a ‘void’ instrumental to experience the two main volumes of the house as ‘pavilions in the park’. The informality of their floating in the garden, with no alignment to the surrounding roads, property boundaries or any other existing reference, as artificial lumps inclined to be ‘interspersed’ with the surrounding trees and vegetation, parts of a continuum between nature and architecture that goes virtually forever, beyond the deliberately unfenced limits of the site, is strongly symptomatic of Boyd’s constant propensity towards undeterminable dimensions of spatial indivisibility.

Fenner House 1953–54 91 Architecture and natural landscape symbiotically interchange and react to each other, sharing and finalising their own qualities in an environment that benefits from their reciprocal combination by staying free of redundant and superfluous elements. The natural presence of the garden, significantly representative of a ‘garden-city’ such as Canberra, is embraced through the extensive glazing that marks the north edge of the day-time wing; at the same time, the shading and screening of this north façade is provided by a dense vegetated screen that is unfamiliar and surprising in scale and yet sympathetic to the ‘landscape’ character of Canberra’s urban tradition. The ‘weak’ separations inside the day-time volume, dividing and yet connecting the living, dining, kitchen and utility areas by means of furniture components, low benches and a few sliding doors instead of fixed partitions, reinforce the sense of spatial continuity. The three bedrooms, study, bathroom and toilet/shower area in the south site are more distinctly – and necessarily – separated by swinging doors and partition walls, whereas it is the playroom space in front of them – a distributing hall capable of becoming “something more”1 through the generosity of its scale and the flexibility and informality of its nature – that guarantees spatial continuity, allowing for visual and physical interrelations not only between the bedrooms but also with the rest of the house and outdoor landscape. A sympathetic addition to the west of the bedroom wing in 1982 has not undermined this house’s capacity to discreetly be an intrinsic part of its open landscape.

Note 1 The “something more” is one of the most essential concepts to Boyd. It is discussed in many of his writings, more in particular in ‘Living and Architecture’, introduction to Living in Australia, Pergamon Press, Sydney, 1970, pp. 4–16.

Figure 5.2. Context plan. Figure 5.3. Site plan. Figure 5.4. Floor plan.

Figure 5.5. View from north. Figure 5.6. Short section. Figure 5.7. Long section.

Figure 5.8. Current view of north wing, north façade. Figure 5.9. Current view from north east. Photographs, Mauro Baracco.

Figure 5.10. Current view of north façade. Photograph, Mauro Baracco.

6  Bridgeford House 1954

Figure 6.1. View from west, 1954. Photograph, Peter Wille, Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria.

6 Bridgeford House 1954

This house is in the outer suburb of Black Rock, 20 kilometres south of Melbourne’s city. It occupies a corner site located along the west edge of Black Rock’s coastline, within the built band that stretches along the coastal road, separating the house from the spectacular environment of its surroundings, including the vegetated cliffs that slope down to Half Moon Bay. Despite these highly scenic site conditions, the house resists the obvious call for a view and avoids raising and imposing its volumes, choosing instead to be discretely hidden within its own allotment. Concealed from the side street behind a brick wall/fence as a solid background to a pergola of beams and louvres that extend the sloping timber structure of its gable roof, this house “is planned for self-contained views”.1 Visually relating to its private landscape rather than to the natural environment beyond its boundaries, the interiors of this house are openly exposed to the outdoor areas shaded by the pergola along the north side; they overlook the various elements of this space – planting strips, a pond, some areas paved in slates, some others in brick – through single fixed panes of plate glass. The sense of spatial continuity between the kitchen, dining and living areas, all reciprocally linked to each other by means of permeable and see-through shelving partitions, also informs the relationship between indoor and outdoor spaces, which is reinforced by the physical ‘extension’ of the dining table – from inside to outside. The sense of non-hierarchy between outdoor and indoor spaces is not only the result of tangible architectural solutions – doors that directly connect each of the bedrooms to the outdoor area; all bedrooms provided with large windows with sills as desks from which to enjoy a visual relationship with the garden; floor-to-ceiling glazing in the living area to enhance a full sense of transparency – but also a reflection of the proportions of the outdoor zones which are similar in footprint to those of the indoor rooms, therefore enabling to experience the external space as if it was somehow a combination of ‘outdoor rooms’. Not surprisingly the graphic layout of the plan of this house is informed by a distinctively diagrammatic character, in which the separations between indoor and outdoor spaces are not immediately apparent.2 The sense of indeterminacy of the front room, used as a winter storage area for original owner Bill Bridgeford’s sailing boat and also a playroom for the

Bridgeford House 1954 99 family’s daughter (later further re-programmed as a study loft by the house’s second owners), goes hand in hand with the unimposing character of the entire house. Resisting the mainstream modernist demand of the ‘view’ as a reflection of the rational inclination to objectify and grasp the world by framing it, this house embraces its surrounding natural landscape without visually possessing it, disclosed to the breezes, sounds and smells of the bay and the expansive overhead sky above the courtyard.

Notes 1 ‘House on the Beach Road, Black Rock’, Architecture and Arts, no. 13, August 1954, p. 26. 2 A caption next to the plan of this house, from a review published soon after the completion of the house, states that: “garden and house blend in this plan”; Peter Lyell, ‘Walled-in for Peace and Space’, Woman’s Day and Home, 4 April 1955, p. 51.

Figure 6.2. Context plan. Figure 6.3. Site plan. Figure 6.4. Floor plan.

Figure 6.5. View from within courtyard. Figure 6.6. Site section. Figure 6.7. Short section.

Figure 6.8. Current view of walled courtyard from north. Figure 6.9. Current view of interior. Photographs, Mauro Baracco.

Figure 6.10. Close up view of courtyard, 1954. Photograph, Peter Wille, Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria.

Figure 6.11. Current view of Half Moon Bay from headland. Figure 6.12. Current view from interior of extending table. Photographs, Mauro Baracco.

7  Richardson House 1954

Figure 7.1. View of building over creekbed undercroft, 1954. Photograph, Peter Wille, Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria.

7 Richardson House 1954

The Richardson House is located in the Melbourne suburb of Toorak, six kilometres south east from the city. The distinctively irregular shape and relatively small size of the site reveals the degree of difficulty that initially informed the design project. Located at the end of a cul-de-sac and squeezed between the street and the four surrounding sites, this ‘quasi-triangular’ urban leftover fragment is part of a subdivision of an old garden with large existing trees and traversed by a dry creek bed. The response to the prohibition to occupy the ground area incised by the dry creek produced a similarly ‘quasi-triangular’ figure – a wedge-shaped plan that allows the building to lightly and freely flow in the wedge-shaped site, detached from the boundaries, inserted among the trees and suspended over the easement. The one-storey house is effectively a bridge – a volume in the air that hangs from two steel-webbed arched beams spanning between two couples of concrete bases which are placed on the opposite banks of the creek bed. The distance between the bases on the north east bank is shorter than the gap between the bases located on the south west side; as a consequence of this the twin arched trusses are slightly unparallel, allowing the house to gradually widen out from one end to the other. The result is a plan layout consisting of two halves – a living and family room occupies the smaller one, revolving around a free-standing fireplace and also including the entry area past the front door; the other half accommodates two bedrooms, an ensuite, a large dressing/ flexible room between them, a bathroom, a kitchen and dining areas. These two latter are spatially related to the living and family areas; all together they form a continuous – rather long and narrow – open space that extends from end to end, effectively conveying the visually linear perception that is normally associated with bridging experiences. A couple of connective points tie this ‘bridge-house’ to the ground: a stepped back entry links the kitchen with an outdoor pedestrian pathway that runs towards the street, and a suspended deck spans from the outdoor garden to the south east façade, hitting it at approximately halfway in correspondence of the front door – this deck further enhances the bridging character of the house. A sloping driveway bends in proximity to the entry deck in order to insert itself between two existing trees to reach an open car space accommodated in the house’s undercroft.

Richardson House 1954 107 The formal and structural outcome of this project is a contextual direct response to the existing site conditions, its intrinsic restrictions and the related building regulations, rather than an aphoristic ideological celebration of technology – the two metallic beams are the consequence of the impossibility to ‘ground’ the building. A strong engagement with the existing landscape and the consequent building’s emergence from the shady sunken gully are further benefits which are indirectly associated with the bridging approach. In its suspended condition, the house is a delicate floating infrastructural presence, entirely surrounded by the green presence of the existing leafy trees. This house in particular, could be seen in the trajectory of buildings that are thought through for their relationship to the ground plane as an essential approach of ‘linking ecology and architecture’, where this often means leaving the ground intact. Subsequently connected to a newer building in the adjacent site at the west end, the spaces of this house are currently primarily used for day-time activities only.

Figure 7.2. Context plan. Figure 7.3. Site plan. Figure 7.4. Floor plan. Figure 7.5. Ground plan.

Figure 7.6. View of undercroft area. Figure 7.7. Long section.

Figure 7.8.  Current view from interior. Figure 7.9. Current view of undercroft. Photographs, Mauro Baracco.

Figure 7.10. View of entry, 1954. Photograph, Mark Strizic, 1928–2012, © courtesy the Estate of the Artist.

Figure 7.11. View from north east, 1954. Figure 7.12. View of entry, 1954. Photographs, Peter Wille, Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria.

8  Holford House 1956

Figure 8.1. View of internal courtyard, 1956. Photograph, Peter Wille, Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria.

8 Holford House 1956

The Holford House is located in the Melbourne suburb of Ivanhoe, 12 kilometres north east from the city. It is situated along the north edge of an extensive green reserve that includes parklands and golf courses spread out in patches among bends of the Yarra River. The site slopes down from the north east to the south west boundary – the former is defined by a street, the latter by a green reserve. The house, a quadrangle of three wings and one external wall enclosing a courtyard, addresses this situation by treating the front along the street as an introverted façade with clerestory windows on the top edge, and conversely releasing the volume towards the parkland by means of full-height windows. The different residential zones are allocated in empathy with this process of gradual uncovering: the night-time areas in the north wing, sufficiently removed from the street but also aside from the internal circulation; toilet, laundry and kitchen in the transitional east wing; dining and living areas open to the parkland from the south wing. A carport, detached from and yet linked to the street, is spatially carved within the north west angle of the building – this void, effectively a volumetric module that has been left open in the structural layout, leads the way to the entry located in the south west corner of the internal courtyard. This carport has been later enclosed and transformed into an additional room – as a result of this, a new carport has been built closer to the street and the entry path to the house now lies along the west side of the external wall, which has been perforated to allow an opening in correspondence of the west short end of the courtyard. A continuous roof, sloping down from the side aligned with the street to the one facing the parkland, is raised over the top of the building’s volumes, revealing the timber posts and beams of its structural network. As observed by Boyd, this device, similarly adopted in some other works, not only enables “freedom in planning while economically providing larger areas of covered exterior living space”1 but also “shades the rooms like a raised parasol, allowing a free passage of air across the insulated tops of the boxes containing the rooms . . . substantially reducing interior temperatures in summer”.2 The roof opens to the sky over the internal courtyard, exposing the beams and becomes a threshold area between the carport/‘vestibulum’ and the entry door/‘ianua’.3 It is an outdoor ‘room’, an additional space for inhabitation

Holford House 1956 115 with the canopy of a tree as a shading and sheltering ‘ceiling’ presence, and low vegetation and concrete pavers as ‘floor’. Surrounded on three sides by glazed façades of floor-to-ceiling windows in timber frames, the courtyard allows the internal spaces to virtually expand outside and be reciprocally interrelated by the visual dematerialisation of their boundaries. The living/dining room, relatively narrow and low, is openly unveiled along its long sides, so as to be projected towards the outside: the expanse of the parkland including the Ivanhoe public golf course, and the more secluded internal courtyard. Although physically enclosed, this room is however pervaded by a sense of unbounded spatiality – its compressed interior pushing outside. The use of the roof to gather spatial and volume entities creates a sense of space that is loose, being primarily defined overhead. This quality is explored often in Boyd’s projects. It is a response to landscape that opens the way to the release of the ground plane.

Notes 1 Robin Boyd, Living in Australia, Pergamon Press, Sydney, 1970, p. 134. 2 Ibid. 3 Open to the sky, the courtyard is in some ways a reinterpretation of an ancient Roman atrium.

Figure 8.2. Context plan. Figure 8.3. Site plan. Figure 8.4. Floor plan.

Figure 8.5. Aerial view showing roof and courtyard. Figure 8.6. Site section. Figure 8.7. Short section.

Figure 8.8. Current view from southern parkland. Photograph, Mauro Baracco.

Figure 8.9. Current view from west through roof. Figure 8.10. Current view of floating eaves. Photographs, Mauro Baracco.

Figure 8.11. View of balcony, 1956. Photograph, Peter Wille, Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria.

Figure 8.12. Current view through detached roof. Photograph, Mauro Baracco.

9  Haughton James House 1956

Figure 9.1. View from river embankment, 1956. Photograph, Peter Wille, Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria.

9 Haughton James House 1956

The Haughton James House is in Melbourne’s inner suburb of Kew, five kilometres east from the city. The site is located on a steep slope on the east side of the Yarra River – it precipitously descends from east to west, meeting the river at its lower end. It is occupied by existing dense vegetation along the left bank of the Yarra. On the other side of the river, large parklands expand towards the north west, including a golf course in the immediate proximity of the river edge. The house is literally embedded within this situation, as an artificial presence that physically stems from the existing conditions of the natural landscape. The lower of its two volumes is embedded into the bank – an almond-shaped retaining volume except for the north west edge which is open to the river and the parklands in the form of a continuous curved glass façade, the outline of which follows the existing contour line. In contrast to the shape and outline of this sunken space, the upper floor is a quadrangular rectangular volume placed on top of the former. Its north west corner slightly cantilevers above the glass wall below, and the east end accommodates a carport (added a few years later) and pathway to the main entry, both of them located under a stretched flat roof. The superimposition of these volumes generates an outdoor space on the roof that covers the north half of the lower almond-shaped volume; this outdoor space is a grassed garden, the manicured character of which counteracts the existing undomesticated vegetation along the bank. Faced by a continuous glass wall that also includes the main entry of the house, and visually projected towards the bank through a cantilevering slab demarcated by a balustrade, this balcony/deck/garden space is informed by a sense of internal extroversion which is characteristic of the entire project. The house is strongly introverted towards the external streetscape and yet openly released towards the bank’s vegetation and the river; the façade along the street is almost entirely blank, except for the clerestory windows on the top edge for light and ventilation to the spaces inside. The main entry is located on the opposite side, at the ‘back’, around the corner from the carport which acts as a ‘humble’ introduction to the house. Contrary to this restrained demeanour, the concealed and more private inside world of the house opens itself in

Haughton James House 1956  123 the direction of the bank through the total transparency of the continuous glass walls that delimitate the building on both levels towards north and north west. The interior space is quite modest in size, tailored on the needs of Boyd’s friend ‘Jimmy’ Haughton James and his partner Wilga. The volume on the top floor accommodates the entry area, one main bedroom with ensuite (including a bath and basin), one small bathroom/toilet and a study/guest bedroom with a shower space; the one on the lower floor accommodates an open-plan living and dining space, a kitchen area with free-standing cupboard and bench, some utility rooms for storage and laundry tucked in between the retaining wall and an extra curved partition that swings in plan from the fireplace and gradually opens up towards the kitchen corner. These two volumes are connected, literally pinned together, by a large ‘monumental’ free suspended stair that descends through a circular stairwell, whose generous dimensions are also instrumental in bringing north sunlight down to the semi-sunken and more ‘cavernous’ space below. In 1967, after the original owners left and sold the house, the house was enlarged at the upper level – the carport and some extra volume were added along the east end, transforming the original open space of the study/guest bedroom into two rooms. The existing trees of the bank have informed the design of the project at many levels. As suggested by Melbourne architect and academic Peter Brew, the trees have partially determined the position of the house1; in addition to this, they have been embraced through the opening of the floor-to-ceiling glass walls and the protruding of the upper garden/deck/balcony space towards the bank. In approaching this project and the way it relates to the existing natural landscape Boyd was guided by an inclination towards minimal interventions. After all, an addition proposed a few years later for the roof of this house is pervasively informed by this type of minimalism – a minimalism by means rather than minimalism of form. This proposal, never built but documented here as an essential part of the whole project, was offering the opportunity to climb even higher, effectively using the roof on top of the carport as a further deck serviced by a ladder – an additional platform in the air, a new layer for external inhabitation, a space further up in the sky that allows to more closely be among the trees.

Note 1 See Peter Brew’s description of this project in Guy Allenby (ed.), ‘The Iris House Then and Now’, Architectural Review Australia, no. 60, Winter 1997, p. 83.

Figure 9.2. Context plan. Figure 9.3. Site plan. Figure 9.4. First floor plan, 1956. Figure 9.5. First floor plan, 1967. Figure 9.6. Ground floor plan.

9.7. View of ground floor towards stairwell. 9.8. View of roof terrace. 9.9. Site section. 9.10. Short section.

Figure 9.11. Current view from roof terrace. Figure 9.12. Current view from embankment. Photographs, Mauro Baracco.

Figure 9.13.  View from north embankment, 1956. Photograph, Peter Wille, Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria.

10  Southgate Fountain 1957–60

Figure 10.1. View of fountains, 1960. Photograph, Mark Strizic, 1928–2012, © courtesy the Estate of the Artist.

10 Southgate Fountain 1957–60

Located on the southern edge of Melbourne’s city, at one end of Princes Bridge, Southgate Fountain was completed in early 1960. It was demolished in the early 1970s to clear the area for the construction of the Melbourne Concert Hall, which was eventually completed in 1982 as part of the Victorian Arts Centre designed by Roy Grounds. Originally sited in the triangular green area formerly known as Snowden Gardens, the fountain was effectively an interconnecting presence between the various different parts – St. Kilda Road axis, Yarra River, Princes Bridge, parkland nearby, industrial buildings – of an urban precinct that at that time was in the process of being significantly transformed from industrial use and storage to mixed programs, including business, retail and cultural activities, café-restaurants, public spaces and promenades along the river. Symptomatically, the current cylindrical Hall retains the same hinging character, providing multilevel and multidirectional interconnection between various types of urban circulation. However, the circles and almond-shaped top plaza of the fountain were more prominent in plan than in reality; visually experienced by passers-by as a fine and discrete silhouette of horizontal lines, they marked and revealed the existing sloping of the ground through a profile of gradually lowering horizontal layers in the act of overhanging upon each other. This thin sign – this delicate horizontal line broken in parts that increase exponentially in diameter while sliding rhythmically away from the top edge of the gardens (respectively 9 m, 13.5 m and 18 m) – refers to the nearby presence of the Yarra River through a correspondence based on horizontality as the intrinsic and most natural status of water. A further link to water and its effects on the natural – as well as local – environment is here registered by the use of “sizable river-worn pebbles from central Victoria”1 which roughen the concrete finishing of the three big bowls. The supporting structure of cantilevering steel pipes keeps the dishes free along their circular edge, detached – although technically stemming – from the ground. Embraced by the continuous space all around them, in which the bowls’ undercroft is inseparable of the whole space of the gardens, river and surrounding urban areas, the three dishes are ethereal platforms, restrained

Southgate Fountain 1957–60 131 diagrammatic lines that engage with the existing horizons of the surrounding landscape. Air, together with water, is the other strong reference and element of this project. The mast at the south end of the top plaza, in the corner slipped into the gardens and marked by a continuous seating exposed to the fountain and river beyond, was provided with a windvane and an anemometer to constantly register the speed and intensity of the wind. In relatively windless conditions the water was sprayed from the top and used to flow through the three bowls according to four different and continuously changing movements: from a gentle and gradual cascading to a more vigorous curtain of sprays and jets often capable of being shot directly into the lowest and largest bowl. The anemometer, however, when detecting strong wind, used to automatically restrain the pumps and control valves, decreasing therefore the intensity and volume of the water curtain in order to protect the passers-by and surrounding roads and pathways from the risk of being drenched. Informed by simplicity of both form and thought, the Southgate Fountain was an example of restraint and richness of expression at the same time, open to continuous subtle variations due to the unpredictability of the beautiful simplicity of the event: a play of water in the air defined by the wind.

Note 1 ‘The Southgate Fountain’, Architecture and Arts, August 1960, p. 41.

Figure 10.2. Context plan, oriented east. Figure 10.3. Site plan.

Figure 10.4. Aerial view from north. Figure 10.5. Site section. Figure 10.6. Long section.

Figure 10.7. View of fountains, 1960. Figure 10.8. Aerial view of fountains from north, 1960. Figure 10.9. Aerial view from south, 1960. Photographs, Mark Strizic, 1928–2012, © courtesy the Estate of the Artist.

Figure 10.10. View of fountains, 1960. Figure 10.11. View of fountains, 1960. Photographs, Mark Strizic, 1928–2012, © courtesy the Estate of the Artist.

11  Boyd House 2 1958

Figure 11.1. View from courtyard, 1958. Photograph, Mark Strizic, 1928–2012, © courtesy the Estate of the Artist.

11 Boyd House 2 1958

The second house that Boyd designed for his family is located in the inner Melbourne suburb of South Yarra, three kilometres from the city in a relatively dense urban fabric. As a response to this situation, the house has an introverted character – two separate volumes are pushed almost to the edge of the east and west boundaries of the site, creating an internal courtyard that is sheltered from the adjacent north and south neighbouring sites by two tall glass walls partially comprising opaque and obscuring panels. The one-storey volume at the back is for the three children; the two-storey volume at the front accommodates the entry, the living and kitchen areas and the parents’ bed-sitting room. An existing mature pine tree along the street is effectively used in this project as a shelter for the entry area and a screen against the western sun, and the natural stepping down of the site is embraced and transformed, on the east side’s end, into an open covered space for parking and storage. Furthermore, the decision to raise the entry to the upper floor releases the frontyard not only from circulation but also from the expectancy, typically and conventionally assigned to this type of space, to act as an ‘entry area’. A flight of steps bridges over this frontyard, automatically transforming it into a private area – effectively a ‘service yard’ – in close relation to both the kitchen and the laundry, yet at the same time maintaining the buffer zone between house and street. Both the conventional mentality that considers space as if it was comprised of individual and separate parts, and the related typical architectural approach that distinctively organises space in ‘up’ and ‘down’ or ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ are here convincingly resisted and revised. The sense of spatial continuity is collected by the presence of a continuous sloping roof suspended over the two volumes and internal courtyard. Reducing itself to a configuration of filiform cables across the central open void and four suspended eaves (two are narrower and run along the top edge of the external north and south glass walls), the roof acts as a covering blanket – a containing armature that comprehensively absorbs, but also allows, the taking place of all the various residential spaces and events. This comprehensive and continuous layer echoes Boyd’s unconcern for spatial separation in regard to this and many other of his projects – describing this house, Boyd himself observes that

Boyd House 2 1958 139 “the whole space enclosed here is one, and in it conventional segregations are neither necessary nor desirable.”1 As a fine and minimal ‘infrastructural’ presence, the roof demarcates the top edge of the house in a light and concise way, somehow reducing its own form to “almost nothing”2 – resembling in section the shapeless profile of a tent-like membraneous structure. At another level, the sharp reduction of the roofline is informed by a strong sense of firmness and straightforwardness, in tune with the sense of directness that characterises the approach of some early pioneer colonial architecture in response to both specific site and situation. In his book Victorian Modern3 and in further writings Boyd expresses admiration for this sense of immediacy as a honest and upfront, somehow ‘intuitive’ and ‘instinctive’ way of addressing the problems and conditions of the project. It is not surprising that both the profile of the roof and the ‘brutalist’ demeanour of the ceiling of this house reveal a close similarity to the shape and character of the roofs common of colonial Australian residential architecture – in particular, some formal reverberations of the profile of the roof above the veranda added in the first decades of the 19th century to the east side of the historically significant 1793 Elizabeth Farm house in Parramatta,4 are very strong. Reinterpreting the simplicity and straightforwardness of form that allows this and other pioneer verandas to effectively provide the house with spaces for both circulation and shelter, Boyd somehow expresses an analogous sense of immediacy, which is indeed conveyed in the project for his family’s house by the resolute yet light profile of the roof layer as the simplest and most direct way to cover the house and visually provide it with a sense of spatial continuity.

Notes 1 Robin Boyd, Living in Australia, Pergamon Press, Sydney, 1970, p. 64. 2 Thinking of the simple and yet rich reductions of Mies, we are here applying to this project a notion borrowed by Tafuri that could be extended to Boyd’s work: “the beinahe nichts, the ‘almost nothing’ ” is a term that on Tafuri’s account was related by American architect Philip Johnson to Mies van der Rohe’s work; Manfredo Tafuri, Francesco Dal Co, Modern Architecture, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York, 1979 (original ed., Architettura Contemporanea, 1976), p. 336. 3 Robin Boyd, Victorian Modern: One Hundred and Eleven Years of Modern Architecture in Victoria, Australia, Architectural Students’ Society of the Royal Victorian Institute of Architects, Melbourne, 1947. 4 See J. M. Freeland, ‘Elizabeth Farm New South Wales’, in Historic Homesteads of Australia, Australian Council of National Trust, Cassell Australia Limited, Melbourne, 1969, pp. 1–7.

Figure 11.2. Context plan. Figure 11.3. Site plan. Figure 11.4. First floor plan. Figure 11.5. Ground floor plan.

Figure 11.6. Aerial view from south west. Figure 11.7. Façade elevation. Figure 11.8. Long section.

Figure 11.9. View of south façade, 1958. Photograph, Peter Wille, Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria.

Figure 11.10. View from entry towards stair, 1958. Photograph, Mark Strizic, 1928–2012, © courtesy the Estate of the Artist.

Figure 11.11. View from courtyard to rear volume, 1958. Figure 11.12. View of ground floor living room, 1958. Photographs, Mark Strizic, 1928–2012, © courtesy the Estate of the Artist.

Figure 11.13. View of façade, 1958. Photograph, Peter Wille, Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria.

12  Lloyd House 1959

Figure 12.1. View from courtyard towards house, 1959. Photograph, Mark Strizic, 1928–2012, © courtesy the Estate of the Artist.

12 Lloyd House 1959

The Lloyd House, demolished in 2003, was located in the suburb of Brighton, 12 kilometres south from the city of Melbourne, and less than one kilometre east from the coastline of Port Phillip Bay. “Built as a crescent round a northerly court”,1 the house was placed in the centre of a rectangular site, with the concave façade embracing an internal courtyard. Similar to many of Boyd’s projects, the design decisions and formal solutions of this house are guided by the existing conditions of the site. An old pear tree along the south edge was maintained as a significant presence of the garden that defined the west side of the site. This open space – labelled in some early drawings as a “service yard” and “children’s garden”2 – was achieved through the curving of a footprint that otherwise would have occupied a longer area of the site, modifying “a slim, rectangular Small Homes plan . . . into a fan shape”.3 The adaptation of this standard type into a curved plan not only provided the house with two buffer areas on the west and east ends of the site, but also allowed the creation of a semicircular internal courtyard – this inflected open space was instrumental to catching the light and sun from the north through a façade of continuous floor-to-ceiling windows. All the rooms directly related to this court, each of them radiating with an open end towards it. The bedroom areas were located at the opposite ends of the crescent: the one for the children, on the west end next to the “children’s garden”, was effectively a large open space with a wardrobe as a dividing partition in the middle of the room; the parents’ bedroom, at the east end, was provided with an ensuite and a study. The remaining core area included a living room, dining room, kitchen and playroom with bathroom/toilet and laundry at its back. A curved hall ran along the external court. Curtains instead of partition walls were used between the hall and the north end of the living, dining and kitchen areas; two sliding doors at the east and west ends of the hall provided access to the parents’ bedroom and the playroom. These ‘light’ elements of separation contributed to the visual permeability between interiors and exteriors; the courtyard, embraced through the transparency of the north façade, was experienced as an extension of the internal spaces rather than a separated outdoor area. A sense of potential endless expansion is characteristic of this project and the related association of the infinite continuity of the circle as a geometric form.

Lloyd House 1959 147 A modularity based on circular sectors was the means to not only define the shape and dimension of the internal spaces which were originally built (as parts of the project that are documented in these pages), but also allow the future expansions which occurred at a later stage (here documented through dotted lines to represent subsequent additions to the west end, and the expansion of the carport space at the east end). Janys and Edward ‘Woods’ Lloyd used to joke fantasising to ultimately extend the crescent – bit by bit, circular sector after circular sector – into a circle over two blocks.4

Notes 1 Robin Boyd, Living in Australia, Pergamon Press, Sydney, 1970, p. 28. 2 See ‘Robin Boyd Original Sketches’, Architecture in Australia, Vol. 62, no. 2, April 1973, p. 75. 3 Geoffrey Serle, Robin Boyd: A Life, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1995, p. 187. The Small Homes Service, as it is mentioned in the introductory essay of this book, was set up and directed by Boyd in the years 1947–54; it was an architect advisory service for the public, sponsored by The Age newspaper and the RVIA (Royal Victorian Institute of Architects). As observed by Neil Clerehan, director of this service in 1951 and from 1954–61, “The sponsorship of The Age enabled the Service to become the force that it did, providing a weekly column where Boyd could publish articles and designs enlightening the public about the Service.” Neil Clerehan, ‘The Age RVIA Small Homes Service’, Transition, no. 38, 1992, p. 58. 4 As a result of a subdivision of a larger block that was originally purchased by Janys Lloyd’s grandfather in 1898, the Lloyd House was sitting immediately south from the block including the house of Janys Lloyd’s mother. The fantasy idea of the circle over the two blocks would involve (in fun) the demolition of the latter house and the relocation of Janys’s mother’s residence in the circle, as an independent and separate part of the extension (from a conversation with Janys Lloyd during a visit to the Lloyd House on 12 March 2003).

Figure 12.2. Context plan. Figure 12.3. Site plan. Figure 12.4. Floor plan.

Figure 12.5. Axonometric view from south east. Figure 12.6. Short section. Figure 12.7. Long section.

Figure 12.8. Interior view towards courtyard, 2003. Figure 12.9. View of rear façade, 2003. Photographs, Mauro Baracco.

Figure 12.10. View of courtyard towards house, 1959. Photograph, Mark Strizic, 1928–2012, © courtesy the Estate of the Artist.

13  Clemson House 1959

Figure 13.1. Current view of street approach, uphill. Photograph, Aaron Pocock.

13 Clemson House 1959

The Clemson House is located in the Melbourne’s inner suburb of Kew, seven kilometres east from the city. The site is considerably steep and densely planted. The house consists of three volumes that descend an existing gully, retreating from both the neighbouring properties and the external streetscape. Painted in a dark eucalyptus green, it is barely visible from the street. The three connected rectilinear boxes sit beneath a separate continuous inverted gable roof that acts as a giant gutter draining the water to the watercourse downhill. The timber structure is exposed, containing the volumes and supporting the roof that extends beyond their perimeter over the natural ground plane to both ‘collect’ the volumes and define outdoor open spaces: a carport on the east side, a balcony on the west side and linear veranda-type spaces along the sides. The day-time areas (entry, living room, dining room and kitchen) are distributed in the west half and two bedrooms, toilet and two small bathrooms in the east half – one of the bathrooms is effectively an ensuite that is directly accessible, similarly to the adjacent walk-in-robe, from the main double bedroom. Each of the bedrooms is provided with a desk/study area along the window. Between the west and east sides there is a transitional area with glazed boundary walls. It includes a laundry on its south half and a free hall in the other half – the latter acts as an interconnecting space for the circulation between day-time, night-time and entry areas. This transitional area, essentially an ‘internal courtyard’ open towards the four sides of the house (although only visually towards north), clearly separates and yet interrelates the two zones of the house. The three volumes respond to the existing slope by gradually stepping down under the roof from east to west. Expressing themselves as individual shed-like boxes and yet integrated parts of the continuous linear shape of the building, these three volumes intimately relate to the surrounding dense natural landscape through the opening of windows (above the desktops in the bedrooms and kitchen, and above the bookshelf in the living room) and floor-to-ceiling glazed walls (translucent in the relational core area between night-time and day-time areas and transparent on the west end of the living and dining areas). A generous balcony outside the living and dining areas – its short side occupies entirely one of the ‘column-to-column’ spatial modules constitutive of this

Clemson House 1959 155 house, thus resulting as wide as both the kitchen area and the relational core area – contributes to visually expand the day-time area, providing it with a ‘veranda in the air’ that effectively works both as a platform suspended among the trees and the natural landscape, and a buffer space to shelter the glazed living and dining areas from the west sun. This house demonstrates an approach that has been traced in the introductory essay as a trajectory towards a linking of ecology and architecture, where the natural site conditions, here particularly the ground plane and hydrology, strongly inform the design.

Figure 13.2. Context plan. Figure 13.3. Site plan. Figure 13.4. Floor plan.

Figure 13.5. View from north. Figure 13.6. Short section. Figure 13.7. Long section.

Figure 13.8. Current view from uphill to roof. Figure 13.9. Current view of south façade. Photographs, Mauro Baracco.

Figure 13.10. Current view from living room towards balcony. Photograph, Aaron Pocock.

Figure 13.11. Current view from balcony. Figure 13.12. Current view from south west. Photographs, Aaron Pocock.

14  Domain Park Flats 1960–62

Figure 14.1. View from Botanic Gardens, 1962. Photograph, Mark Strizic, 1928–2012, © courtesy the Estate of the Artist.

14 Domain Park Flats 1960–62

Domain Park Flats are located in the inner Melbourne suburb of South Yarra, less than three kilometres south east of the city. Placed immediately across the south east corner of the Royal Botanic Gardens, this residential building embodies Boyd’s ideal architectural type in response to the presence of urban parklands – “a ‘highrise’ block . . . overlooking public gardens”.1 In opposition to a general expectation in 1960s Australian society for low and somehow ‘invisible’ architectures on the edges of park reserves, this multistorey building takes opportunistic advantage of the voids that lie in front and behind it, ‘charging’ them with its own thin and tall presence. The revisitation of the notion of the ‘charged void’ consistently proposed by English architects Alison and Peter Smithson in their ideas, to which Boyd expressed affinity, is here related to the open parkland that has historically acted as an urban hinge, absorbing and being charged by the different built densities and fabrics of the city and South Yarra suburb, lying respectively on the north and south bank of the river. It is also related to the scale of the public housing towers scattered throughout Melbourne, architectural types praised by Boyd as appropriate examples of urban and social density in proximity to centrally located amenities and infrastructures. The deliberate narrowness of the building intends to further amplify the sense of open exposure to both the landscape of the park and Port Philip Bay towards the south. As stated by Boyd, “all main rooms . . . fill its width and have an outlook both ways, so giving these rooms a heightened sense of isolation and suspension in space.”2 This result is also achieved through the compacting of the building’s footprint, which occupies a small portion of the entire site, therefore allowing generous open space around the tower that visually links to the parkland. The building accommodates twenty floors, the maximum height allowed by the regulations of that time, and comprises over sixty flats of four different types: medium-size two-bedroom, big two-bedroom, three-bedroom and two penthouses. An open degree of flexibility in the layout configuration of the various flat types is allowed within the repetitive structure of concrete vertical columns and horizontal slabs uninterruptedly expressed over the four elevations. Effectively acting in the main north façade as a modular armature to ‘keep together’ the randomly scattered balconies protruding from each living

Domain Park Flats 1960–62 163 room and the window mullions which are freely distributed accordingly to the position of internal partitions, this grid allows “variety within unity”, a notion consistently proposed by Boyd as characteristic of a less dogmatic type of modernism – a late post-structuralist modernism more inclined to certain degrees of experiential ambiguity, released from the orthodoxy of both early 20th century functionalism and following pervasive examples of monumental geometrical-structural formalism.3 Two tall separate towers are located at the back, on the south façade. They accommodate lifts and staircases and house small shared lobbies to access the flats – never more than two per floor, often only one, from each lobby – and the external escape balconies that span and provide a link between the two towers. The deliberate exclusion of head jambs on internal doors creates a continuous ceiling in every flat enhancing the sense of spatial continuity very often defined by the overhead plane and effectively experienced as compressed space. This distinctive sense of compression somehow ‘squeezes’ the space out, projecting and extending it to the north and south horizons of Melbourne, from which this building is visible at many points as a recognisable reference – a gently brutalist presence, familiar and contextualised, differently from orthodox modernist buildings, because of its interesting ability to negotiate between the abstraction of the grid and variety of façade elements, between its own weight and its own thinness, between the verticality of its towers and the horizontal compression of its spaces.

Notes 1 Robin Boyd, Living in Australia, Pergamon Press, Sydney, 1970, p. 58. 2 Ibid. 3 See Robin Boyd, The Puzzle of Architecture, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1965, pp. 142–45.

Figure 14.2. Context plan. Figure 14.3. Site plan. Figure 14.4. Floor plan, 1:1000, typical.

Figure 14.5. Aerial view from north west. Figure 14.6. Short section, 1:1000. Figure 14.7. North elevation, 1:1000.

Figure 14.8. Current detail view of north façade. Photograph, Aaron Pocock.

Figure 14.9. View of façade from ground level, 1962. Figure 14.10. View from north east, 1962. Figure 14.11. View from Domain Park Road, 1962. Photographs, Mark Strizic, 1928–2012, © courtesy the Estate of the Artist.

Figure 14.12. View from Botanic Gardens, 1962. Photograph, Mark Strizic, 1928–2012, © courtesy the Estate of the Artist.

15  Arnold House 1963–64

Figure 15.1. Current view from south east of building embedded into slope. Photograph, Mauro Baracco.

15 Arnold House 1963–64

Kel and Ann Arnold’s earlier timber house was destroyed, together with many other properties including the first Wright House designed by Boyd, by a devastating fire that affected the north east region of Melbourne in mid-January 1962. As a consequence of this Robin Boyd was commissioned to design a new house in the same site. Located in the outer Melbourne suburb of Warrandyte, 30 kilometres north east from the city, this house stands on the top of a gentle ridge and exposes its two-storey side to an escarpment that sharply falls towards the right bank of the Yarra River. The site is populated by particularly dense eucalypt trees, spread across the two different slopes of the site – one ascending from the road on the west side, and the other descending towards the river on the east side. The structure and material of the house are bush-fire resistant – the roof, external cladding, framing posts and beams are all in steel. The house accommodates two levels, responding to the existing slope; the lower floor set into the hillside, with a glazed wall facing the double height veranda space, is separated from some storage areas by an outdoor covered garden. The two separate levels are connected by an outdoor staircase, which effectively acts as a curved free ‘hinging bridge’ between the two floors. This bridging strategy is further and more pronouncedly implemented in the layout of both the entry area and the main living spaces of the house, as well as the circulation that interconnects them. A carport space, a suspended entry bridge adjacent to the curved staircase, a dining/living area and an insect-screened balcony are parts of a continuous spatial sequence along a bridging axis that is visually protruding towards the river further down in the valley. The dining/living area is a distinct bridging element not only along this axis, but also between a generous family room located on the north west end of the house and the south east wing of the building including the kitchen and laundry, two single bedrooms, one main bedroom with ensuite, one bathroom, a wide corridor/ playroom area and an internal garden space. Bridging can be generally considered as a device to connect things that are different and separate in character, and therefore to dilute their sense of difference and separation, making them equal and with no sense of hierarchy

Arnold House 1963–64 171 between one another. This is particularly evident in the Arnold House, in which the bridging happens between parts that can be read as different and individual and yet similar in proportion and dimension. For example, the outdoor spaces on both the long sides of the central dining/living room – the fly-screened deck and the void past the carport – have the same spatial proportions of this internal space, becoming effectively two outdoor ‘extra rooms’ adjacent to it. Analogously, a similarity characterises the spaces and volumetric dimensions of the open covered garden and the enclosed and semi-enclosed areas above it which respectively accommodate the dining/living room and the screened deck. This design approach, consistently investigated by Boyd, leads to results in which relatively small buildings feel and look larger through the presence of outdoor spaces that are ‘dimensioned’ and laid out as if they were effective surplus domestic areas and collected by a singular roof. This sense of ambiguity and non-hierarchy between indoor and outdoor spaces, demonstrates Boyd’s inclination to design spaces that can flexibly change in spatial dimensions and functional needs. This house is a very good example of this approach. The main day-time areas on the upper level are all interrelated, but also at the same time separable, through large floor-to-ceiling sliding partition panels, which allow the living, dining and kitchen areas to be individually used when necessary, or to alternatively be one whole continuous space, including as well the immediate outdoor spaces. For example, the hallway playroom space opens up to, and is effectively doubled up by, an internal/ external garden court. The robust and strong box form of the double height façade is offset by the thin roof and double height columns, again creating a sense of a building as a large veranda.

Figure 15.2. Context plan. Figure 15.3. Site plan. Figure 15.4.  Floor plan. Figure 15.5.  Ground plan.

Figure 15.6. View of internal hallway and related garden court. Figure 15.7. Site section. Figure 15.8. Short section.

Figure 15.9. Current view from north of double height volume. Figure 15.10. Current view from balcony under north façade. Photographs, Mauro Baracco.

Figure 15.11. View from south through building showing continuous ceiling plane. Figure 15.12. Current view of west façade. Photographs, Mauro Baracco.

16  Baker House 1964–66 + Baker ‘Dower’ House 1966–68

Figure 16.1. Baker House, view of exterior through trees, 1966. Photograph, Mark Strizic, 1928–2012, © courtesy the Estate of the Artist.

Figure 16.2. Baker ‘Dower’ House, current view of entry. Photograph, Mauro Baracco.

16 Baker House 1964–66 + Baker ‘Dower’ House 1966–68

Located near Bacchus Marsh, 50 kilometres north west of Melbourne, two houses were built a few years apart to respectively accommodate the Baker family who moved from England to Australia in the early 1960s, and Mrs Elizabeth Sticklen, the mother of Michael Baker’s former wife Rosemary, who followed a few years later – the name ‘Dower’ commonly attributed to the latter house derives from the English definition of this term, meaning: “a widow’s share for life of her husband’s estate”.1 The location of the houses, a private block of land of a quarter of a square mile in the heart of Long Forrest Mallee Conservation Reserve, responds to Michael Baker’s desire to live in a land share that is dimensionally equivalent to the total number of Australians (the calculation was done on the basis that the 3,000 square miles of all Australian territory were at that time inhabited by 12 million people). In addition to this, this specific site was chosen as a piece of bushland that would be equidistant from the two working places of Michael as a lecturer in mathematics: the University of Melbourne in Carlton (an inner suburb of Melbourne) and the RAAF Academy at Point Cook, along Port Phillip Bay’s coastline. Immersed in the dense vegetation of multi-trunked eucalypts and other various types of shrubs and grasses that typically characterise the normally flat and arid conditions of this and other mallee bushland,2 the houses are like two square marks dispersed in their surrounding thick natural environment. They are approximately 150 metres away from each other, with a third building, including a library and art studio, halfway between them – this was designed by Melbourne architect Roy Grounds a few years after Boyd’s death. Baker House was designed to be as self-sufficient as possible – the tanks to collect water from the roof in 7 of the 12 cylindrical volumes along the house’s perimeter (the remaining 5 provide storage space) and a schoolroom/playroom on the south side in which the five children were taught by visiting tutors, are symptomatic of this house’s sense of isolation. Embracing at once the classic formality typical of central plan schemes and the romantic simplicity of the farmhouse-type, this house has a ‘rough/heavy’ materiality (stones from a local quarry for the walls, polished concrete for the floor, straw for the ceiling) and yet stands in the bush as lightly and exposed as a tent. It is open to the

Baker ‘Dower’ House 1966–68 179 surrounding nature through separations that only tenuously define the difference between its indoor and outdoor worlds, including floor-to-ceiling glazing all around the larger rooms (clockwise from north: living/dining, kitchen, main double bedroom, schoolroom/playroom, studio, guest room, library) and a flyscreen (now removed) above the internal courtyard. The circulation between the various rooms, evenly and fluidly meandering from inside to outside (the verandas on all sides and some of the curved outdoor areas in the corners are used to link the rooms), tends to ‘con-fuse’ indoor and outdoor areas. The internal courtyard, impenetrable from the three sides lined up with the smaller rooms (larder and laundry, main bedroom’s ensuite and children’s toilet and showers on the east side; four children’s cubicles/bedrooms on the south side; cellar, guests’ washroom, guests’ dressing room, guests’ bathroom and darkroom on the west side), is released and visually open to the surrounding mallee vegetation through its top and the glazing of both the north and south side of the entry/living/dining area. The encompassing roof is the strongest element of the building, compressing the space confidently against the ground with a lowness, or groundedness in response to the flat groundplane and its low vegetation. The Baker ‘Dower’ House, smaller and a couple of years younger than the Baker House, has a plan of curved walls beneath a square, almost flat, roof. This layout, evoking an ideogram in its graphic, is the residue of an unbuilt design idea that was involved with the construction of a continuous low stone wall. Intended as a fence around an oval vineyard between the two houses, this long line3 was in the end restricted to the flourish – something between a knot and a flower – originally envisaged as a twitching moment along its course to define the residential spaces. Compressing and expanding itself, the line drops its continuity into separate curvilinear filaments that allow openings between the various areas. A further negotiation between the curved walls and the rectilinear sides generates spaces that are part of a continuum, regardless of whether they are ‘indoor’, ‘outdoor’ or both at once: the fly-screened entry veranda on the west side introduces a living/dining room that spatially links into a circular corner containing the kitchen; one of the two bedrooms is provided with a dressing space and related external walled small garden, the other one occupies the south east corner; the lumpish curved protuberance from the east façade incorporates a small outdoor space with a water tank, and a bathroom inside the glazing; the north east corner is a covered carport. The cladding of this house is in stones which were quarried by hand from the property by the Baker family. The discreetness of this and the Baker house – their formal restraint under roofs that delicately disappear due to the extreme gentleness of their inclination, yet confidently define a space in this resistant and difficult scale of landscape – reveals Boyd’s consistent approach of nuance between the natural and the artificial. In this case the situation was particularly appropriate, as “somehow it was like designing . . . building(s) for Robinson Crusoe . . . the only man-made thing(s) to disturb the primeval calm of the bush.”4

180  Robin Boyd: selected works

Notes 1 The Oxford Dictionary, Thesaurus, and Wordpower Guide (ed. by Catherine Soanes, Maurice White, Sara Hawker), Oxford University Press, New York, 2001. The term ‘dower’, while used here, does not precisely reflect the family’s situation; Michael Baker was always the owner of this second house while it was inhabited by Elizabeth Sticklen for three years, until her death, and subsequently by Judith Harris, Michael Baker’s mother, for 14 years. The property, including the two houses and the library, was sold to a new private owner in 2006. 2 Mallee is an Aboriginal name for a group of eucalypts which grow to a height of 2–9 metres and have many stems arising from a swollen woody base known as a lignotuber. . . . Several layers of vegetation grow in association with Mallee eucalypts. . . . Mallee areas are generally very flat.http://www.anbg.gov.au/edu cation/pdfs/mallee-2002.pdf, p. 2. 3 See dashed line in site plan. 4 Robin Boyd, Living in Australia, Pergamon Press, Sydney, 1970, p. 123.

Figure 16.3. Baker House, view of exterior through trees, 1966. Figure 16.4. Baker ‘Dower’ House, view of entry, 1968. Photographs, Peter Wille, Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria.

Figure 16.5. Context plan, combined. Figure 16.6. Site plan, combined. Figure 16.7. Site section, Baker House.

Figure 16.8. Section, Baker House. Figure 16.9. Floor plan, Baker House.

Figure 16.10. Section, Baker ‘Dower’ House. Figure 16.11. Floor plan, Baker ‘Dower’ House.

Figure 16.12. View of interior, Baker ‘Dower’ House. Figure 16.13. View of façade, Baker House. Figure 16.14. View of courtyard, Baker House.

Figure 16.15. Baker House, view from interior to central courtyard, 1966. Figure 16.16. Baker House, view of exterior through trees, 1966. Photographs, Mark Strizic, 1928–2012, © courtesy the Estate of the Artist.

Figure 16.17. Baker House, current view of central courtyard. Photograph, Mauro Baracco.

Figure 16.18. Baker House, view of living/dining room and central courtyard beyond, 1966. Photograph, Mark Strizic, 1928–2012, © courtesy the Estate of the Artist.

Figure 16.19. Baker ‘Dower’ House, current view of interior. Figure 16.20. Baker ‘Dower’ House, current view of interior. Photographs, Mauro Baracco.

Figure 16.21. Baker ‘Dower’ House, view from upslope, 1968. Photograph, Peter Wille, Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria.

Figure 16.22. Baker ‘Dower’ House, current view of interior. Figure 16.23. Baker ‘Dower’ House, current view of north façade. Photographs, Mauro Baracco.

17  Lawrence House + Flats 1966–68

Figure 17.1. View of street façade, 1968. Photograph, Mark Strizic, 1928–2012, © courtesy the Estate of the Artist.

17 Lawrence House + Flats 1966–68

The Lawrence House and Flats are located in Melbourne’s inner suburb of Kew, seven kilometres east from the city. Three different households – two two-bedroom flats and one single-family house – share the same site, on a piece of land that slopes steeply down from east to west. This site condition is exploited by the project becoming the means for a subdivision in which the house’s spaces are vertically compacted into a tree-level building in the west half of the site, where the clearance from the ground floor is at its highest degree. Urban densification, consistently promoted by Boyd as a way to contain the sprawl of Australian cities, is here achieved through a building that even if considerably smaller than some of his proposals for multistorey towers, does however offer a radical alternative to the low density of its surroundings, and more generally to the Australian suburban fabric typically consisting of one single-family house per block. As a denser clump of buildings, this work is an innovative precursor of the contemporary investigations into urban and architectural sustainability, including strategies of densification by subdivision. Two flats in the volume at the front of the site are serviced by a common stairwell directly accessible from the footpath. Each of them accommodates two bedrooms, a living room, kitchen area, bathroom/toilet and laundry. A double carport is located under the building, open to a ramp that descends from the street. An annexed open service area is fenced on three sides by brick walls. An open entry raised deck past the front carport acts as a spine that connects the volumes and interspersed voids. It leads to the house’s entry, running above and parallel to the main and largest area of the outdoor space that surrounds the house. A living room, kitchen area, dining room, study, kitchen, laundry and toilet are located on the second floor, past the entry door. Three bedrooms, a bathroom and toilet are accommodated on the first floor, one level below. One of the bedrooms is tucked in the basement of the flats’ site, reachable from the house through a glazed link that bridges over the outdoor space. The ground floor, designed originally as a large playroom further down below, has been later transformed into a relatively independent space with a kitchen unit and separate bathroom. Connecting the three storeys, a staircase also becomes a pivotal space that on the first and second levels is wrapped by a continuous circulation that interlinks the service areas to the main rooms.

Lawrence House + Flats 1966–68 193 The use of exposed brick throughout the building, including all exterior and many interior walls, provides a sense of continuity to a project that is articulated in various volumes, with the façades further broken up by brick stepbacks and corbels. The voids are equally treated and defined as spaces. These open areas are similar in shape, dimension and character to the internal rooms: the deck/balcony to the entry door as an outdoor hallway; the deck next to the kitchen, screened by a sliding panel along its south edge, as an open service room; the undercroft below the living room as an additional double height outdoor living space; the main garden area, carved out from the volumes that are around and above it, as an outdoor playroom. Conversely, many interior spaces are drawn outside of their boundaries: the glazed bridge/hallway/link to the bedroom below the flats is an enclosed outdoor space; both the study on the second floor and the main bedroom below are projected towards the trees’ canopies and the open landscape beyond through an unframed glazed corner. Negative and positive spaces are ‘con-fused’, intertwined vertically and horizontally throughout the building, instigating doubts about our logically relational way of conceiving them as separate, different and often hierarchically laid out. The logical duality that is applied as well to the relational contrast between architecture and nature is expressed by opposing the artificial building, a constructed network of horizontal and vertical elements, to the natural inclination of the existing sloping ground. Yet, the various openings eroding the mass of the building call for continuity of architecture and landscape. A project of restoration1 in empathy with Boyd’s approach, has reconfirmed some external spaces with a long timber deck that runs from the main garden area at the centre of the site to the west end of the building, floating through the undercroft space, linking these two spaces while registering their different states of groundedness and being in the air.

Note 1 Restoration and landscape design by Baracco+Wright Architects, 2005.

Figure 17.2. Context plan. Figure 17.3. Site plan. Figure 17.4. Axonometric view from south east. Figure 17.5. View from living room towards east. Figure 17.6. Long section.

Figure 17.7.  Second floor plan. Figure 17.8. First floor plan. Figure 17.9.  Ground floor plan.

Figure 17.10. Current detail view of north façade. Photograph, Mauro Baracco.

Figure 17.11. Current view of living room towards west. Figure 17.12. Current view of bedroom towards north west. Figure 17.13. Current view towards entry. Photographs, Aaron Pocock.

Figure 17.14. View of inner façade from central garden, 1968. Photograph, Mark Strizic, 1928–2012, © courtesy the Estate of the Artist.

18  Farfor Holiday Houses 1966–68

18.1 Figure. View of two façades from north, 1968. Photograph, Mark Strizic, 1928–2012, © courtesy the Estate of the Artist.

18 Farfor Holiday Houses 1966–68

This group of four holiday houses is in Portsea, 100 kilometres south of Melbourne. It is the outcome of an investment project by the owner of a relatively large block of land which was subdivided to include three more houses in addition to the owner’s residence. Located at the end of the long shoreline on the east side of Port Phillip Bay, the site is situated between the major road of the area and the cliff above the beach. The houses, all equally configured with the same internal spatial distribution, relate to a range of outdoor conditions due to their different positions within the site; as stated by Boyd, they “are identical but each has its own private, and in some way different, outlook from the long window-wall of its main rooms”.1 As a group of ‘identical’ and yet ‘different’ entities the two on the north side are more directly exposed to the bay, the one in the middle is surrounded by the site’s internal landscape, and the one along the road relates to more internalised types of views and outdoor spaces. Each house comprises a wide hallway, three bedrooms, a living/dining space, kitchen area, toilet, bathroom, internal courtyard/garden and carport. The hallway is effectively an additional “semi-outdoor garden space”;2 with a floor of pebbles, pavers and plants, this ‘internal exterior’ is open to the outside through a flyscreen that runs along one of its two long sides. The carport and the internal courtyard/garden, tenuously defined as ‘exterior’ spaces by this permeable edge, are also at the same time drawn inside the house, in direct continuity with the outdoor character of the hallway. The dialogue between outdoor and indoor, a recurrent theme of Boyd’s enquiries into spatial interrelation, is addressed here by the more informal type of inhabitation that typically characterises holiday houses and their related activities, usually inclined to spill out and overlap in spaces that are interrelated between each other with no distinctive sense of hierarchy or individual separation. The windowless bedrooms along the hallway are ‘tent-like’ spaces that relate to their ‘camping ground’ – the hallway and internal courtyard/garden – by receiving the natural breeze through the flyscreen; the carport, hallway and internal courtyard/garden provide surplus space for various uses, from storage to additional playroom areas; the kitchen area is turned inside out, exposed to the internal courtyard/garden from one side and released, through the openness

Farfor Holiday Houses 1966–68 201 of the other side, to the spatial continuum between the living/dining space and the outdoor areas beyond; the main bedroom and its own ensuite shares the rectangular space at the back with the living/dining space, to which it directly opens through a sliding panel. A veranda space along the back edge of each house is defined by a large timber-framed eave opening towards the sky in order to allow a deeper penetration of sunlight and strong spatial release.

Notes 1 Robin Boyd, Living in Australia, Pergamon Press, Sydney, 1970, p. 60. 2 Ibid.

Figure 18.2. Context plan. Figure 18.3. Site plan. Figure 18.4. Floor plan, 1:1000.

Figure 18.5. Aerial view from south east. Figure 18.6. Long section, north east house. Figure 18.7. Detail floor plan, north east house.

Figure 18.8. View of houses within shared garden, 1968. Photograph, Peter Wille, Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria.

Figure 18.9.  View of garden hallway, 1968. Photograph, Mark Strizic, 1928–2012, © courtesy the Estate of the Artist.

19  McClune House 1967–68

Figure 19.1.  View of north façade, 1968. Photograph, Mark Strizic, 1928–2012, © courtesy the Estate of the Artist.

19 McClune House 1967–68

The McClune House is located in south Frankston, 45 kilometres south east from Melbourne’s city area. The house is placed in the south east corner of a site that slopes towards a creek as the north boundary edge. A steep gully parallel to the west façade of the house runs from south to north, approximately cutting through the middle of the site. The entire site is densely vegetated. The house, although accommodated in a clearing, completely embraces this situation in many different aspects. Unobtrusively withdrawn in a corner of the site, and sensitively occupying a marginal portion of the existing vegetated land, the building requires no more than a short and relatively uninvasive link to the street. The house incorporates all its spaces under the presence of a unifying roof, in a form of a compact whole. The gentle inclination and low silhouette of the four pitched roof was described by Boyd as “a big parasol”.1 A generous internal garden court, sheltered on all four sides by continuous translucent fibreglass eaves, translates and domesticates the surrounding nature into garden beds that are distributed between brick pathways. The sky is ‘pulled inside’ this indoor/outdoor space by means of a central square opening. Reminiscent of a Roman atrium, this central court is literally a threshold, a transitional space that provides entry to the house and absorbs crisscrossing shortcuts between the various domestic spaces around; it is of course “something more”2 than this: as an additional indoor/outdoor room – a greenhouse/ sunroom – it shelters from the heat, wind and other excesses of nature, facilitating cooling and cross ventilation in conjunction with the raised roof, and offering protection from the resistant ‘indefiniteness’ of the surrounding bush. In addition to this central space, two smaller outdoor courts are similarly open to the sky and yet introverted in relation to their immediate surrounding landscape. Highly interiorised, they offer at once a sense of spatial expansion and private containment of their related interiors. The almost square south courtyard, although protruding from the street front, is essentially the ‘backyard’ of the house. The longer and narrower rectangular court on the east side provides the main double bedroom and adjacent bathroom with an outdoor area, allowing an external link between these interior spaces.

McClune House 1967–68 209 Adjacent to and physically between these two domestic areas comprising indoor and outdoor spaces, the covered carport at the end of the driveway is similar in proportion, dimension and shape to the internal rooms of the house – an ‘open room’. The entry door pushed into the corner works as a relational hinge to ambiguously separate and reciprocally link the outdoor/covered carport and the indoor/outdoor central atrium, the former as an informal preamble and the latter the ‘official’ introduction to the interior spaces. Analogous in character and cornered position to the entry door, the small square vestibule at the diagonally opposite end of the garden court is a transitional space that interconnects the circulation between the indoor/outdoor central atrium, the outdoor space on the north side, and the two different types of areas inside the house: day-time spaces (living room, dining room, kitchen, pantry and laundry) in the west and south wings, and more private and night-time rooms (study, one single and one main double bedroom, bathroom) on the north and east sides. The square presence and four-pitched shape of the roof provides the outdoor spaces along the house’s external perimeter with a continuous veranda that changes in dimension and character accordingly to each specific situation: the stepping back of the north façade, allowing room for a wider veranda, confirms the intended exposure of this side to its natural and built landscape – this projection towards the bush and the creek down below is highlighted by the denounced extroversion of the north front (a proposed but unrealised swimming pool as shown in the plan emphasises this intention), continuously clad, unlike the others, in floorto-ceiling timber frame glazing.

Notes 1 Robin Boyd, Living in Australia, Pergamon Press, Sydney, 1970, p. 105. 2 The “something more”, one of the most essential concepts to Boyd, has been discussed – and referred to some Boyd’s writings – in previous projects. See Fenner House.

Figure 19.2. Context plan. Figure 19.3. Site plan. Figure 19.4. Floor plan.

Figure 19.5. Axonometric view from south east. Figure 19.6. View of courtyard. Figure 19.7. Site section. Figure 19.8. Section.

Figure 19.9. Current view from south east. Figure 19.10. Current view of carport and entry to internal courtyard. Photographs, Mauro Baracco.

Figure 19.11. View of internal courtyard, 1968. Photograph, Mark Strizic, 1928–2012, © courtesy the Estate of the Artist.

Figure 19.12. View of study and living room in the background, 1968. Photograph, Mark Strizic, 1928–2012, © courtesy the Estate of the Artist.

20  Featherston House 1967–69

Figure 20.1. Current view of south façade. Photograph, Aaron Pocock.

20 Featherston House 1967–69

This house was designed for Mary and Grant Featherston, two industrial designers, and is located in Ivanhoe, an inner suburb north east of Melbourne. It comprises an open and boundless large central space containing the general living areas, and two volumes on its two sides to accommodate both some service rooms (a workshop, a kitchen, a family room, two guest rooms, a bathroom and dressing room) and an annexed two-storey flat which was originally designed for Mary Featherston’s parents. Located on the threshold between the built fabric of south Ivanhoe and an open area of a park reserve, a creek and the green fields of a school, this house absorbs the existing situation of its site, displaying a hard, solid and blank front to the mass and severity of the sloping edge below the road on the north east suburban boundary, and opening itself to embrace the bushy landscape of the south west open area through a ‘softer’ transparent glass wall. The response to Mary and Grant’s dream to live in ‘the open’ was to design a house with no individual and separate rooms. Provided, instead, with areas of inhabitation of spatial continuity, the openness of this house carries at once the character of two different conditions – that of the big industrial shed and that of the covered outdoor space. Potentially interchangeable programs are located through platforms for the studio, dining, living and bedroom areas underneath a translucent roof (originally fibreglass, now polycarbonate). The sense of openness of covered outdoor areas is here visibly reflected in the retention of the sloping and exposed ground plane that carries through the building. The platforms, floating above and in between the internal garden, contribute to create an unseparated space which is never informed by a sense of hierarchy between architectural components; ground, mezzanine, upper floors, but also architectural and landscape presences and all façades on the perimeter, including the translucent roof, coexist as interrelated parts and yet in a continuum. The numerous variations in use through the years provided by the indeterminateness of this house are the immediate reflection of a generous sense of potentiality. It is perhaps not coincidental that in the same period of the design and conception of this project Boyd praised the floating platforms and

Featherston House 1967–69 217 the open plan of Frei Otto’s German Pavilion for the 1967 International Expo in Montreal – which he could visit while he was involved with the design and construction of the Australian Pavilion’s interiors at the same exposition – as a “keen, brave and potential (space) . . . the design (of which) is, literally as well as figuratively, open-ended . . . it changes continuously and engagingly as the visitor walks among the exhibits on the many-stepped platforms”.1 The flexibility and potentiality of the Featherston House, analogously to the lightness and indeterminateness of Otto’s ‘tent’ for the Montreal Expo and many other works of this German architect, is the result of a level of simplicity based on the coexistence of density and understatement of form at once. These qualities allow this house to effectively act as an unassertive means not only for constant changes and events, but also for continuous forms of correlation between the architecture and its own site, situation, place. Also emblematic of this character are the full-width and floor-to-ceiling south west glazed wall – which is not a frame for ‘possessing’ the view, but rather a medium through which indoor and outdoor landscapes join – and the unpretentious carport along the front – interested in providing permeability in circulation and spatial continuity rather than in figuratively representing a ‘main façade’. Alison and Peter Smithson, as empathetic references to Boyd who reviewed some of their work, suggest qualities for a building of the ‘Conglomerate Order’ – qualities that not surprisingly can precisely describe this house has a capacity to absorb spontaneous additions, subtractions, technical modifications without disturbing its sense of order, indeed such changes enhance it; . . . has faces which are all equally considered . . . no back, no front, all faces are equally engaged with that lies before them, the roof is “another face”; is an inextricable part of a larger fabric; is dominated by one material, the conglomerate’s matrix; . . . is lumpish and has weight.2

Notes 1 Robin Boyd, ‘Germany’, The Architectural Review, vol. 142, no. 846, pp. 129 and 135. 2 These observations were published more than 20 years after Boyd’s death in Alison and Peter Smithson, Italian Thoughts, A. + P. Smithson, London (printed in Sweden), 1993, p. 62.

ST

KINGSLE Y

ST

ELPHIN ST

THE GR

RD RESERVE

R YE TH

CLARK

SPARKS

CT

K AR CL

AN LV SY

Figure 20.2. Context plan. Figure 20.3. Site plan. Figure 20.4.  Floor plan.

WATERDALE

NK

PIKE TURN

LLOWBA

Figure 20.5. View from south west. Figure 20.6. Long section. Figure 20.7. Site section. Figure 20.8. First floor plan. Figure 20.9. Second floor plan.

Figure 20.10. Current view of interior towards south. Photograph, Aaron Pocock.

Figure 20.11. View of interior from south east corner, 1969. Photograph, Mark Strizic, 1928–2012, © courtesy the Estate of the Artist.

Figure 20.12. Bird’s-eye view from upper platform, 1969. Photograph, Mark Strizic, 1928–2012, © courtesy the Estate of the Artist.

Figure 20.13. View from upper north slope, 1969. Photograph, Peter Wille, Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria.

Figure 20.14. View of interior towards south west, 1969. Photograph, Mark Strizic, 1928–2012, © courtesy the Estate of the Artist.

Figure 20.15. Current view of interior towards south west. Photograph, Aaron Pocock.

Figure 20.16. Current view of upper platform. Photograph, Aaron Pocock.

21  Hegarty House 1969–72

Figure 21.1. Current view of north façade from downhill. Photograph, Aaron Pocock.

21 Hegarty House 1969–72

Located in the outer suburb of Ringwood East, 30 kilometres east of Melbournes’ central district, the Hegarty House sits on a steep sloping site. Descending from west to east along its longitudinal axis, the rectangular site visually embraces the horizon of the Dandenong Ranges, with Mount Dandenong as the focal point. The shape of the house is the direct consequence of the site condition; a linear cascade of spaces and volumes is distributed on different levels under two inclined roofs, gradually stretching from both west to east and south to north, in order to open themselves respectively to the view of Mount Dandenong and direct sunlight. The three levels of the day-time areas, under the larger and lower of the two roofs, are all spatially interconnected and yet individually defined through flights of steps. The levels visually interrelate as a whole continuous space in absence of partitions; a couple of low walls next to the steps allow spatial and visual continuity, but also a useful degree of functional separation between the kitchen on the top, dining and study in the intermediate level and living area aside of the entry hall at the bottom. The external deck on top of the garage, further down from the entry and living areas, and from the latter separated by a free-standing glazed wall, reiterates the gradual stepping down of the building, which eventually ends on the street level, where the relationship with the surrounding context is played out through the weakening of the ‘main façade’ idea by means of a blank and unassuming – virtually not there – street front. The three bedrooms, on top of the site at the opposite end, sit above a generous laundry area adjacent to the kitchen and an excavated storage room located at the back of the house. Differently from the spaces below, all interrelated and opened at once to the view of the east and the light of the north, these rooms are individual spaces with their own individual openings. The main double bedroom is exposed to the east view through a long continuous window that is sandwiched between the two roofs, resting on the top of a builtin cupboard; this room is directly linked to a walk-in-robe area and ensuite, and through the latter to an external ‘deck/court’ located on the north side and provided with an outdoor shower. The two single bedrooms have one window each, facing respectively north and west.

Hegarty House 1969–72 227 The roof follows the sloping ground, unifying the stepped forms and the internal stepped levels through a continuous ceiling plane. The roof extends in generous eaves along the long sides of the building in veranda like spaces that compress the space outside its physical boundary extending into the outside. This is the last work over which Boyd would see the completion; he was able to enjoy some celebratory drinks with the original owner Patrick Hegarty only a few weeks before unexpectedly dying in October 1971.

Figure 21.2. Context plan. Figure 21.3. Site plan. Figure 21.4. First floor plan. Figure 21.5. Floor plan.

Figure 21.6. Axonometric view from north east. Figure 21.7. Aerial view from north east. Figure 21.8. Long section.

Figure 21.9. Current view of living room. Figure 21.10. Current view of north façade. Photographs, Aaron Pocock.

Figure 21.11. Current view of street façade. Photograph, Mauro Baracco

Figure 21.12. Current view of north façade from uphill. Photograph, Aaron Pocock.

Bibliography

Boyd, Robin, Victorian Modern: One Hundred and Eleven Years of Modern Architecture in Victoria, Australia, Architectural Students’ Society of the Royal Victorian Institute of Architects, Melbourne, 1947 Boyd, Robin, The Puzzle of Architecture, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1965 Boyd, Robin, New Directions in Japanese Architecture, George Braziller, New York, 1968 Boyd, Robin, Living in Australia, Pergamon Press, Sydney, 1970 Freeland, J.M., ‘Elizabeth Farm New South Wales’, in Historic Homesteads of Australia, Australian Council of National Trust, Cassell Australia Limited, Melbourne, 1969 Serle, Geoffrey, Robin Boyd: A Life, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1995 Smithson, Alison; Smithson, Peter, Italian Thoughts, A. + P. Smithson, London (printed in Sweden), 1993 Tafuri, Manfredo; Dal Co, Francesco, Modern Architecture, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York, 1979 (original ed., Architettura Contemporanea, 1976)

Journals Allenby, Guy (ed.), ‘The Iris House then and Now’, Architectural Review Australia, no. 60, Winter 1997 Boyd, Robin, ‘Germany’ (a review of the German Pavilion at the 1967 Montreal International Exposition), The Architectural Review, vol. 142, no. 846, August 1967 Creighton, Trevor; Freeman, Peter; Russell, Roslyn, Manning Clark House: Reflections, Manning Clark House, Forrest, ACT, 2002 Hamann, Conrad; Hamann, Chris, ‘Anger and the New Order: Some Aspects of Robin Boyd’s Career’, Transition, vol. 2, no. 3/4, September/December 1981 ‘House near Melbourne’, The Architectural Review, vol. 108, no. 647, November 1950 ‘House at Camberwell’, Architecture and Arts, no. 13, August 1954 ‘House on the Beach Road, Black Rock’, Architecture and Arts, August 1954 Lyell, Peter, ‘Walled-in for Peace and Space’, Woman’s Day and Home, 4 April 1955 ‘Robin Boyd, Original Sketches’, Architecture in Australia, vol. 62, no. 2, April 1973 ‘The Southgate Fountain’, Architecture and Arts, August 1960

234  Bibliography Archives/Collections of Robin Boyd’s work Robin Boyd Collection, Australian Manuscripts Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne

Dictionaries Soanes, Catherine; Waite, Maurice; Hawker, Sara (eds.), The Oxford Dictionary, Thesaurus, and Wordpower Guide, Oxford University Press, New York, 2001

Index

Italicized page numbers indicate figures. absent presence 90 Age, The 24 “Age of the World Picture, The” 9 – 10, 43 – 4n29 Ancher, Sydney 14 angst 42 – 3n28 architecture: Heideggerian philosophy and 4, 8; linking ecology and 17 – 24, 107; machine 12; modernism in 8, 13 – 14; outdoor rooms 16 – 17; released from being “object” and repositioned as agent 20 – 1; sustainability in 18, 19, 21; technology and 12; see also indoor outdoor spaces; landscapes; spatial continuity Arnold, Ann 170 Arnold, Kel 170 Arnold House, 1963 – 64 170 – 1, 172 – 5, 177 Ashihara, Yoshinobu 83 Australian Institute of Architects 5 Australia’s Home 6, 39 – 40n9 awnings, natural 17 Baker, Michael 178 Baker House, 1964 – 66 + Baker ‘Dower’ House, 1966 – 68 178 – 9, 181 – 9, 191 balconies, outdoor 16 Barrabool Landscape Design and Re-fit 20, 31 – 3 Baracco+Wright Architects 18, 22 – 3 Benedetti, Carla 41n15 Botanic Gardens 6 Boyd, Petheridge & Bell 5 Boyd, Robin xx; Australia’s Home 6; con-fusion 8 – 9, 10 – 11, 17, 58 – 9, 179, 193; designed and published work of 38n3 – 4, 55 – 6; drawings

of 56; dualities destabilised in projects of 16 – 17; Heideggerian philosophy and xx – xxi, 4, 8, 9 – 17, 23; inclusive thinking of 10 – 11, 14; indeterminateness and 14 – 15, 98 – 9, 217; interest in landscape 5 – 6; lack of recognisable style 8; Living in Australia 17; machine architecture and 12; multidisciplinary approach of 5, 23 – 4; The Puzzle of Architecture 39n5; relevance of 18 – 19; spatial continuity and (see spatial continuity); state of separation and difference between parts 15 – 16; Victorian Modern 139 Boyd House 1, 1947 57, 58 – 9, 60 – 3, 65 Boyd House 2, 1958 138 – 9, 140 – 3, 145 Brack, John 19 Bradley method 21 – 2 Brew, Peter 123 Bridgeford, Bill 98 Bridgeford House, 1954 98 – 9, 100 – 3, 105 bridging 106, 170 – 1, 193 Brutalism, British 5 Buhrich, Hugh 19 “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” 46 – 7n39 Cacciari, Massimo 9, 41n20, 42n26, 46 – 7n39, 48n43 Carnich Towers 6, 25 Clark, Dymphna 74, 75, 75n3 Clark, Manning 74 Clemson House, 1959 154 – 5, 156 – 9, 161 Clerehan, Neil 24 con-fusion 8 – 9, 10 – 11, 17, 58 – 9, 75, 179, 193

236 Index “Conglomerate Order” 217 courtyards, outdoor 17, 114 – 15, 179, 208 – 9, 210 – 13 Da-sein/being-in-the-world 11 – 12, 43n28 De Carlo, Giancarlo 19 densification, urban 192 Dodd, Melanie 22 – 3 Domain Park Flats, 1960 – 62 6, 162 – 3, 164 – 7, 169 Domus magazine 19 dualities in space 16 – 17 Durand, Jean-Nicolas-Louis 48 – 9n49 ecology linked to architecture 17 – 24,  107 Empiricism, Scandinavian 5 Farfor Holiday Houses, 1966 – 68 200 – 1, 202 – 7 Farnsworth House, 1945 – 50 83 Featherston, Grant 216 Featherston, Mary 216 Featherston House, 1967 – 69 216 – 17, 218 – 23, 225 featurism 6, 50n53 Fenner House, 1953 – 54 90 – 1, 92 – 5, 97 Finlay, Keith 82 Finlay House, 1952 – 53 82 – 3, 84 – 7, 89 “First 200 Years, The” 29 flyscreens 16 Freeman, Peter 75n3 front yards 17 Garage+Deck+Landscape, 2006 20, 30 garages/carports 16, 114 – 15, 192 Garden House, 2013 – 15 21, 36 – 8 ghost landscapes 21 – 2 Gillison, Douglas 66 Gillison House, 1952 66 – 7, 68 – 71, 73 Griffin, Walter Burley 74 Griffin, Marion Mahony 74, 75 Grounds, Romberg and Boyd 5 Grounds, Roy 14, 130, 178 Hamann, Conrad 42n23 Haughton James House, 1956 122 – 3, 124 – 7, 129 Hegarty House, 1969 – 72 226 – 7, 228 – 31 Heidegger, Martin xx – xxi, 4, 8, 9 – 17, 23, 40 – 1n13, 41 – 2n22; “Age of the World Picture, The” 9 – 10, 43 – 4n29; on angst 42 – 3n28; on critical engagement 44 – 5n30; Da-sein/

being-in-the-world 11 – 12, 43n28; Letter on Humanism 9; on oneness 46n37; Poetry, Language, Thought 44n29; as state of wondering 9, 12; on Western culture and thought 42n25 highrise buildings 19, 162 – 3, 164 – 7, 169 hinging bridge design 170 Holford House, 1956 114 – 15, 116 – 19, 121 inclusive thinking of Boyd 10 – 11, 14 indeterminateness 14 – 15, 98 – 9,  217 indoor outdoor spaces 4, 74 – 5; ambiguity and non-hierarchy between 171; central court and 208 – 7, 210 – 13; openness and 200 – 1; outdoor rooms 16 – 17; potentiality and 82 – 3 internationalism, mainstream 5 Island Home: A Landscape Memoir 38n1 James, Haughton 123 Jimmy Watson’s Wine Bar 6, 28 John Batman Motor Inn 6, 27 Kant, Immanuel 48n43 landscapes: Bradley method 21 – 2; ghost 21 – 2; natural 3, 122; open 3; opportunistic integration of 18; outdoor 16; relationship between Australian people and 19; second post-war period movements in 5; suburban 4; sustainable 18, 19; see also architecture; indoor outdoor spaces Lawrence House + Flats, 1966 – 68 192 – 3, 194 – 7, 199 Letter on Humanism 9 Living in Australia 17 living rooms as bedrooms 16 Lloyd, Edward 147 Lloyd, Janys 147 Lloyd House, 1959 146 – 7, 148 – 51, 153 machine architecture 12 Manning Clark House, 1952 74 – 5, 76 – 9, 81, 90 McClune House, 1967 – 68 38n2, 208 – 9, 210 – 13, 215 McIntyre, Peter 14 Metabolism, Japanese 5 Mies van der Rohe 83 minimalism 123 modernism 8; machine architecture and 12; mainstream 13 – 14

Index  237 Montreal International Expo 6, 13, 217 Muller, Peter 14 multidisciplinary approach of Robin Boyd 5, 23 – 4 natural awnings 17 natural landscape 3, 122 Neo-realism, Italian 5, 39n6 oneness 46n37 open-endedness 13 open landscape 3 Otto, Frei 13, 217 outdoor rooms 16 – 17; see also indoor outdoor spaces part-ness 15 Pelican House 29 Poetry, Language, Thought 44n29 potentiality 82 – 3, 146 – 7 Précis des leçons d’architecture 48 – 9n49 Presland, Gary 21 Puzzle of Architecture, The 39n5 Regenerated Towns in Regenerated Nature 20 Richardson House, 1954 106 – 7, 108 – 11, 113 Robin Boyd: The Architect as Critic 41n19 Romberg, Frederick 14 Romberg and Boyd 5 roofs 16 – 17, 83, 114, 179, 226 – 7 Rose House 2009 21, 34 – 5

Seidler, Harry 14 self-contained views 98 Shinohara, Kazuo 19 Smithson, Alison 19, 162, 217 Smithson, Peter 19, 162 Southgate Fountain, 1957 – 60 26, 55, 130 – 1, 132 – 5, 137 spatial continuity: belonging together of things and 18; in Boyd House 158 – 9; in Boyd House 2 138 – 9; in Boyd’s projects xx – xxii, 15; defined 4 – 5; indoor outdoor spaces and 4, 74 – 5; integration and 7; landscape and 3 – 4; parts in 15 – 17; see also architecture Sticklen, Elizabeth 178 suburban landscapes 4 sustainability 18, 19, 21 topological space 49n50 trees 17, 20, 22, 115 Tree Sprawl 20 undercroft spaces 17 urban densification 192 Victorian Modern 139 Vitiello, Vincenzo 49n50 water see Southgate Fountain, 1957 – 60 Wescott, Geoff 7 Williams, Fred 19 Winton, Tim 3, 4, 38n1 World War II 9 Wright House 82