Architecture: Separation Creek House

Architects: Jackson Clements Burrows Pty Ltd Architects
Location: Separation Creek, Victoria, Australia
Project Team: Graham Burrows, Tim Jackson, Jon Clements, Anthony Chan, Chris Price, Huan Trinh, Joachim Holland, Anna Guelzo, Kim Stapleton
Design duration: 24 months
Construction duration: 12 months
Landscape: Ocean Road Landscaping
Rock Anchoring: Wessell Drilling
Contractor: Spence Building and Joinery
Constructed Area: 220 sqm

 

The treehouse is sited in the bush fringe of Separation Creek, perched on a steep forested hillside above the Great Ocean Road and Bass Strait. It is a site that enjoys a unique combination of bush environment with intimate views of Separation Creek, the beach and the Wye River Peninsula to beyond.

The steepness of the site, landscape controls and landslip potential resulted in a limited building envelope to work within. These constraints (or opportunities) led us to explore a sensitive yet sculptural response that minimised it footprint by echoing in form a tree with branches, with rooms branching and cantilevering in all directions of a central trunk to take advantage of views, access and aspect.

A modest brief called for a three bedroom residence with associated living spaces.

Upper level projections include an entry branch with study, a sunroom to the west, and a living area and deck cantilevering some 6m meters from the core overlooking the ocean and beach below. At a half level lower, the master bedroom wing springs from the stair landing into the bush to the east.

A dining room and kitchen make up the upper level core of the building, whilst two further bedrooms, bathroom and laundry complete the lower level accommodation.

In its applied materiality, the treehouse draws on the modest local vernacular of 1950′s painted fibro shacks with cement sheet lining and expressed battens over joints. The cement sheet panels used on the treehouse are painted in 2 tones of green that help merge with building with the vegetation on the hillside in which it sits and reinforce its relationship with the landscape. The vertical timber battens on the building are a naturally stained timber, which will silver over time like the branches and trunks of trees within the bush.

The sculptural form and associated colour scheme allow the built form to both connect with the landscape and to dissolve it within it. The two tones of green pick up on colour variations and light and shade within the bush, and effectively reduce the mass of the object within the landscape. Varying light intensities across the course of the day further affects the colours and consequently the buildings relationship with its context in an engaging and dynamic way.

 

 

  

 

Architecture: Shiseikan's

Architects: Kengo Kuma & Associates

Location: Sakyo-ku, Kyoto-shi, Kyoto Prefecture, Japan

Completion: 2008

Site area: 65,892.34 sqm

Total floor area: 5,002.529 sqm

Our principle for the design of art schools was that the architecture must lift up the students’ spirits. Nowadays, we see lots of dry, dispiriting school buildings perhaps because there were requests for the buildings that are easy for maintenance. In order to counter such tendency, the new building for Kyoto University of Art and Design must have shown something new.

However, the project turned out to be extremely difficult. The first challenge was its site, which was almost a cliff. To build a big-scale building in this environment seemed technically impossible. The architecture came into being with the idea from our structural engineer, Mr Norihide Imamura, that the 67-strong earth anchors would link the cliff and the building. The second task was that since this new building stands at the core of all activities in the campus, it had to be a place to smoothen the flow of various logistics in and around. Rather than designing a new solid object, which is a commonly-observed method in such project, our concept was that the architecture itself could be made flexible to play different roles, such as a bridge, slope or a hole. Same approach was applied for the façade of the building.

Our neighboring building, Ningenkan, was a massive stone-clad building. If we had repeated the same pattern for Shiseikan, the impact of our neighbor’s colonnade would have been ruined. So while avoiding colonnades, we attempted to preserve the force and coarseness of the stone. Triple-stacking of pure granite (25cm×60cm×4.5m) at the south and was an unprecedented detail, but responded well to the colonnade of Ningenkan, and the stone pillars to the west, with the passages in between, became visually effective as the view from Shirakawa-Dori, strong enough to be the symbol of the university yet delicate as if it could naturally fuse into its landscape, which is designated as a scenic preservation area. Students tend to vacillate between opting for ‘heaviness’ or ‘lightness’ in architecture. We wanted to encourage them by taking the third way.

In this way, we abandoned the style of ‘wholeness’ of classical architecture by proposing a design that thoroughly ‘compromises’ with our neighboring environment.

Architecture: Riverside Clubhouse

Riverside Clubhouse / TAO

Architects: TAO  (Trace Architecture Office)
Location: Yancheng, Jiangsu, China
Design Team: HUA Li, Zhang Feng
Floor area: 500 sqm.
Completion: 2010
Client: Zhongti Corp.
Photographs: Yao Li

The clubhouse is located on one side of a river in Yancheng, surrounded by a park and sports field. The extended horizon, sky, water, island in river, and reed, these elements of the site define a tranquil, pure and poetic atmosphere. In such an environment, we think architecture must be a careful intervention to the site, to avoid ruining the original sense of place and meanwhile create the close contact with nature. Thus a glass building on riverside and in trees naturally comes to mind as beginning idea, to integrate visitor, architecture and landscape.

The design therefore takes Mies’ Farnsworth as a prototype concept and creates a new form through a series of actions on it: stretch, loop, and fold. These actions lead to following results: smaller building depth with better views, introversive courtyard space offering more privacy, getting closer to water and accessible roof as extension of landscape. The transparency dematerializes architecture. The concern to physical form of building is replaced by desire to create flowing and see-through space to maximize visitors’ experience of natural environment outside.

Responding to the horizontal feature of surrounding landscape and trees in site, the building is made into a linear and folded form. It zigzags and flows, sometimes approaching the ground, sometimes floating in the air. While inside it provides to visitors various views at different level and angle, it also gives an impression that architecture is touching the site in a very “light” form, thus creating a subtlety. The soft soil geo-condition of the site also makes this floating form structurally reasonable since slim columns on pile foundations support the building.

The floor thickness and column size are made to their minimum dimensions to emphasize the “light” character of building and feeling of floating. The materials such as low iron glass, white aluminum panel, travertine floor, precast concrete panel and translucent glass partition are used to gain formal abstraction and to create the atmosphere of simplicity and purity. In the context of lacking local materials and craftsmanship, an abstract form becomes a natural choice aesthetically.

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