This source provided a valuable insight into the design processes behind the house, specifically in relation to a house is a container of human activities.
"A number of themes were explored with this project. - The development of the interior plan as an extension of the broader (borrowed) landscape. - To positively engage with the ground plane rather than a disconnected elevated living experience. - To modulate light and views to create constantly shifting visual experiences. - To create variable strategies for living inside & out under variable exposed conditions. Beach context. This beach house avoids the preoccupation to hug the boundary to maximise sea views, instead a sequence of ocean vignettes are playfully screened and framed against the house and landscape. The challenge for this site was that the property was newly subdivided and this house was one of the first to be constructed. In order to optimise privacy, and at the same time open up views, adjoining properties were modeled to second guess possible future sight lines. The brief required internal and external spaces to be able to cope with the prevailing breezes under a variety of conditions. Subsequently the envelop becomes almost infinitely switchable to enable alternate occupation of the inside and outside areas. Materiality The immediate surrounding materials of caked sand, native pandanus and water were the reference for a palette of raw concrete, glass and zinc offset with the warmth of timber and woven cane screens to create an environment of contrast where the 'elegant' versus 'raw' versus 'refined' versus 'natural'
would allow the client to feel dressed for dinner in wet togs. Function The building primarily accommodates a family of 5 with room for another family. The plan is divided into various distinct parts: 1. Captured external space described by the series of landscaped courts 2. The lounge and study wing flanked by still water ponds with an enclosed courtyard to the west and a loosely described court to the east with the surf and ocean as its backdrop. 3. Kitchen and dining wing pushes out toward the beach and is able to open directly to the ocean to the east and/or to the court to its north. 4. The children's wing above the lounge democratically places their rooms off a glazed corridor and on a raised platform so that the extent of view to the landscape, ocean and sky can be expanded. Woven cane shoji screens conceal and reveal the extent of this prospect. 5. The glazed parents suite on the eastern wing is enclosed with articulated woven cane screens which modulate light views and privacy. Key experiences From the approach to the entry the ocean is concealed and the house turns it back on the west and the busy David Low Way. Upon passing through into the courtyard, the ocean and its horizon are revealed. Apart from this spectacle the routes through the house constantly frame and reframe other places to explore. Boundaries are blurred between the house and beach where intimate spaces and expansive views align."
Ward, Mat (2009), Sunrise Beach house, available from:<http://www.australiandesignreview.com/design_wall/9664-Sunrise-Beach-house>( accessed 11/3/11)
This reading provided valuable information on the aspects of a house is an environmental filter, specifically how it uses the site context in such a unique manner.
"Architecture is best considered as full immersion rather than as dazzling, detached graphic. The full sensory experience of place is ultimately that much more important than the triumphal façade and swagger. This three dimensional quality of space and of sight, sound and touch is what makes architecture such a complex, difficult art to apprehend. The Sunrise Beach house designed by Brisbane firm Wilson Architects looks to the subtle, peripheral sensations of place rather than big-time bluster, to make its mark.
There is a contradiction about Australia’s coastal development. What should be very easy rarely is. So much energy and potential is simply wasted in the frenzy to fill allotments. Never mind the quality, feel the width. There are exceptions and the Sunrise Beach residence on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, is one such standout.Rather than prestige frontage and pergola clad rear, this house blurs its ‘entry’ and ‘exit’ into a series of walls, apertures and portals. Its edges and openings are every bit as important as the walls, roof and floor. Modern without overt or banal references, the design dances with shadow and light. Wilson displays a sculptor’s eye for material possibilities that brings into alignment elemental building materials of stone, water, timber and glass. It creates a compelling rhythm of opposites: solidity and transparency, light and dark, cool and warm, hard and soft.
“Throughout but most noticeably in the sleek glazing and crafted wicker screens is an interfluent rhythm of patterned shadow and raking light.”In essence the design works around a series of concrete planes and glass ‘screens.’ The effect is one of a solidity bathed in effulgent light. In plan the house has a high-walled frontage to the busy David Low Way arterial that connects a string of prized beach resorts from Maroochydore to Noosa Heads. From street level there is no real hint of what exists beyond its quite immaculate cast concrete walls. Entry via a solid timber door provides an immediately seductive introduction of splintered light and cascading stone slab steps and feature pond. A set of full-height pivoting doors with Viridian ComfortPlus™ high performance Low E Laminated glass reinforces the sense of calm, cool space.
The sequence of ‘stairs’ involves a gradual descent from the high roadside to the house proper to provide a cool, welcoming entry. The transition from courtyard to living/family space defined by a narrow pond is straddled by a stone plinth. On either side is a wall of tall vertical glass and timber fins that act as operable breeze and light scoops.
Transition to the main living area, kitchen/ meals wing and courtyard is immediate. The subtlety of entry as veiled, operable glass is followed by sudden and astonishing breadth of blue/green horizon. With windows open or closed, the effect is the same. Throughout but most noticeably in the sleek glazing and crafted wicker screens is an interfluent rhythm of patterned shadow and raking light.
The principal outdoor room is created by a ‘U’ shaped beach side courtyard that collects daylight and breezes yet acts as windbreak.
In all a perfect place to observe the sights and sounds of living by the water’s edge. As if to heighten the relationship to water, a pool and cabana form part of the program around an invented oasis.
Entry to the main living space leads to a sizable central living/family space pared to reveal the elemental qualities of place. The interior designer client has been sensitively restrained and economical in expression requiring few objects to compete with sky, sea or horizon.
Despite its deep overhang and cave-like embrace the spatial qualities capture a great flexibility that draws on traditions of the Australian verandah, French brise soleil, Middle Eastern jealousie and Japanese sliding rice-paper shoji screen.
The architecture of partial enclosure, or enclave, echoes to traditional courtyard houses of Spain, Portugal and North Africa. Courtyards have long been the place to seek summer shade and winter light. The idea of courtyards as places of contemplation, calm and delight has been popular in Japan since at least the feudalera. By the mid-20th century architects such as the Mexican architect Luis Barragan imbued the courtyard house with magical qualities of sharp light and deep shade.
Hamilton Wilson’s fondness for this manipulated, sliced grid and deep courtyard employs technologies – high performance glazing for instance – simply not available to the early modernists. And it allows an even more dedicated response with crisp venting and passive design. There are though certain obligations to such design that requires greater commitment than simply setting the climate control switch and tuning out. In truth, air conditioning is rarely, if ever, required with such passive solar and thermal efficiency.
“Art lives by its skeleton… grasp the skeleton and you can grasp the art.”The region’s mostly benign climate permits ambitious investigations of the invented and natural. The house borrows many of the ancient and old traditions of screened, cool mass to create a fully functional aesthetic with privacy and prospect. Big, broad openings, vast sliding, pivoting and operable glass windows and walls, Pandanus palm fronds and landscape intermingle in ways reminiscent of the great mid-20th century north American modernist Richard Neutra whose ideas for truly deluxe living was so grounded and connected to place.
Le Corbusier
Orientation is on a east-west axis where the main living area receives a raking ocean sunrise. Giant pivoting glass and timber doors at the front entrance to the west filter strong, hot sunlight, yet the sense even here is of a screened, appreciably filtered light.
Throughout the house the story of the high performance glazing and woven cane recurs. The whole top floor of the L-shaped plan is decongested with vertically adjusted Viridian Low E glazing to invite air movement and provide both glimpsed and widescreen views.
Traditions of permeable forms, of cool stone and timber floors and bespoke furniture, contribute an easy sense of air and occupant circulation. The expression of glass to filter and wicker panels for veiled privacy mediates sunlight, glare and reflected ocean light as necessary. Upstairs bedrooms for instance are separated not by the typical solid or plaster wall, but screened from the passageway by full height, sliding wicker panels. In the master bedroom and en-suite the technique is repeated. The effect is as beguiling as it is original.
Continuing the language of permeable, lightweight, breathable parts, the wickerwork is employed across the staircase as balustrade and deftly counterpoints the heavyweight, more muscular elements.
Winner of the Queensland chapter architecture awards for residential design, jury chairman Peter Skinner noted: “This house is one that requires direct first-hand sensory experience to fully appreciate the subtlety of architecture conceived as a precise synthesis of inhabitation within landscape. Formally, the house is a successful hybrid of the open pavilion beach house type with urban courtyard house models that serve to cocoon a gentle internal domesticity within a hostile external setting.
“Traditions of permeable forms, of cool, stone and timber floors and bespoke furniture contribute an easy sense of air and occupant circulation.”“Immaculately cast perimeter walls protect the stepped entry courtyard from western sun and traffic and enclose a zone of calm, grounded landscape at the top of the site. The landscape connection flows across the open living pavilion, through eastern outdoor living zones to the dunal landscape and the breaking surf and horizon beyond. A decision to draw back from the permissible beachfront building line allows precise control of a middle distance landscape framed by magnificently positioned Pandanus trees and the pool surface protected by a landscaped haha.
“The lighter construction elements use elegant operable walls, windows and screens to allow precise tuning for sun, view and breeze. The jury particularly noted the fineness of joinery, cabinetwork, stair and screen detail and the finesse of construction. This is a mature, refined and very thoughtful synthesis of architecture and its setting of space and place.”
For his part, Hamilton Wilson extols the benefits of understatement. He says the house “…avoids the preoccupation to hug the boundary to maximize sea views, instead a sequence of ocean vignettes are playfully screened and framed against the house and landscape.
“The challenge for this site was that the property was newly subdivided and this house was one of the first to be constructed. In order to optimize privacy, and at the same time open up views, adjoining properties were modeled to second-guess possible future sight lines.
“The brief required internal and external spaces to be able to cope with the prevailing breezes under a variety of conditions. Subsequently the envelope becomes almost infinitely switchable to enable alternate occupation of the inside and outside areas.
If much early – and some late – modernist architecture stood accused for its cold formality and sense of enforced detention, Wilson demonstrates that clinical rigour holds no relevance or interest. While his work possesses great formal clarity the overriding sense is its sensual, tactile and human qualities.
In an age of instant gratification, here is an example of slow, painstaking effort. While the grandiose residence, the fashionista, spares no expense to separate from its surroundings, this is the structure fully mated to place.
As the architectural historian and critic Philip Drew observed almost two decades ago: “The pleasure of open horizons was best appreciated from a verandah. By preserving visual contact with the horizon which represents infinity, the verandah puts each of us in touch with the sublime. Perhaps this is the greatest gift of all – the establishment of intimacy with immensity.”
The Sunrise Beach house echoes to other cultures and earlier times, yet is entirely modern. In moving through and around such a house, we don’t merely see it as a single, disconnected object, but experience a sequence of transcendent spaces opening to the intimate and infinite."
Viridian glass (2009), Watercolour, available from:<http://www.viridianglass.com/Case_Studies/Vision/vision12-2/default.aspx>(accessed 14/3/11)
Wilson Architects home site also provided valuable pictures and information on their work.
Wilson Architects (2009), Sunrise Beach house, available from:<http://www.wilsonarchitects.com.au/landscape_sunrise_more.html>(accessed 12/3/11)
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