HOUSE House

One extended family owns two neighbouring houses. Both houses are equally in need of repair and update. Our proposal is to create a single building with mirrored spaces wrapped around a central spine. The rear fence slides away to create one large backyard.

Melbourne is flat, with very low density. There are few topographical or spatial constraints to force houses to have a small footprint while stacking rooms and spaces above. In cities like Tokyo, London and Amsterdam living vertically is a way of life that generates unique housing while also making the most of a densely packed urban condition. In greater Melbourne space is readily available and flat which has led to predominately wide flat single storey homes, and furthermore has led to Australia having the largest houses in the world. But what if we introduce a footprint restriction where one need not exist? What if we build a tall thin structure that maximizes the small back yard. We produce spaces that, though familiar in many parts of the world, are unfamiliar in Australia; tall, tight cavernous spaces with light cascading from above.

HOUSE House is a deliberate attempt at importing an architectural model

from a fundamentally different urban condition. This is a Tokyo house in suburban Melbourne. However this Richmond site is smaller and tighter than outer suburban sites. Amongst other reasons, people move to the suburbs under the false logic that they will have lots of open space and room for kids to play, however the enormous size of houses now makes this a convenient myth rather than a true outcome. If one extrapolates HOUSE house to imagine numerous quarter acre blocks with similar forms, then we would have a landscape that truly adopts the often used reasoning of open space and room for kids to play.

Graphic...

We have an exposed cedar wall on the boundary. Tagging is to be expected on almost any exposed wall around Melbourne. Most tagging is drawn with black spray paint. To combat this we introduced a black graphic to the facade that either makes the black tag invisible or alternatively can be quickly painted over to discourage additional tagging. The graphic used is the child like image of a suburban home. Here we see the overlap of two distinct approaches to the single family house; the stereotypical Australian home overlaid on the import.