Space Envelopers

Sydney Morning Herald

Thursday June 28, 2007

Words Anne Susskind

An inside-out approach has given these architects the edge.

Brian Donovan and Timothy Hill are the architects' architects, deemed by their colleagues to have designed the two best Australian houses of the past 25 years.

In a survey of 1000 industry professionals by the magazine Architectural Review their remarkable C House, completed nearly a decade ago, was top and their D House came next. Both are in Brisbane.

Donovan says he and Hill design from the inside out, unlike many of the star architects - particularly Frank Gehry and Renzo Piano - whose initial response is to come up with a shape, or impressionist image, before anything else.

"A lot of architectural work is about how the house looks from the street - an object placed on the site," he says. "We don't have a preconceived form."

Each part of the C House, he says, is an "episode" - a window is arranged to get a view of a particular tree or to let light in, for example - which in turn has a bearing on the elevation of the building.

Andrew Mackenzie, the magazine's editor, calls Donovan Hill "the jujitsu masters of architecture" because of their capacity to work within difficult constraints, whether financial, planning, heritage or site limitations. The firm excels at balancing "the single artistic moment and the skilful application of pragmatic design moves".

Other architects are equally rhapsodic. The C House, says Sydney's Brian Zulaikha, "is the embodiment of craft, detailing and experimentation . . . the architects have revelled in taking every material and surface as far as possible".

Success has come early. Donovan and Hill are both in their 40s, which is considered young in their field. As Donovan says: "Frank Gehry [of the Guggenheim in Bilbao] was still doing extensions at 42."

They now employ about 30 people and Donovan attributes their success and large body of work - about 50 houses and several major public projects, including the acclaimed Neville Bonner building, housing state government offices, in Brisbane - in part to the consistently buoyant economy in Queensland and a university education that allowed for inspiration and feedback from tutors. In their final year there were eight students, as opposed to 60 today. Their professors and mentors were local heroes Brit Andresen (an RAIA gold medal winner) and her late partner, Peter O'Gorman.

The C House, which took eight years to design and build, has been compared with a nobleman's villa. One of its central ideas, explored also in the D House and others, is that the principal space is outdoors - a double-volume central courtyard, part-covered by a woven timber roof, with a sandstone base and north-west views of the city. It's accessible from all rooms in the house, which is, essentially, a carefully orchestrated set of terraces - entry plaza, office and lap pool, communal living level with bedrooms and a private suite above.

The house is mostly concrete (the owner is in the concrete construction industry) in a mix of off-white and pale golden sand colours, softened by rock maple floors, pale timber joinery and timber screening, glass, occasionally blue-green or dark pink, and ceramic tiles. Intricacy and interest come through varied ceiling heights and fine detailing, such as cane-wrapped timber grips on the stairs.

Donovan regards the house, one of their earliest commissions, as their most "significant and complete piece of architecture". The owner, 30 at the time, "saw it as a house for a lifetime". As the builder, too, he could see that it was beautifully handcrafted. "Instead of 10 people for two weeks, there would be two people for 10 weeks. Maybe the thing about the C House is that it's the craft and quality in the construction systems that pull it together."

Their houses also have sustainable credentials: they face the right direction for wind and sun, ventilate well and have water collection. But the company's major contribution at this level is to make buildings that are adaptable and recyclable. Offices may be long and narrow, so they can be recycled as apartments, and houses are designed to adapt to their owners' changing needs. The C House can be used as a family house, for an extended family or as a home and office, while the D House can lend itself to commercial uses. Completed two years after the C House, in the inner suburb of New Farm near the Brisbane River, the D House - which won the Robin Boyd award for housing - is in-fill housing in the former yard of the building next door. It has two bedrooms but there's also a large, long, low window that, when the shutter slides away, can open to the street.

Homes are the most painful projects for an architect, Donovan says, and relationships between client, architect and builders are intense and can become stressful if not properly managed. "You get very close. The clients are emotional and attached [to the project] and, for us, the architects' professional and financial obligations create an almost moral overlay," he says.

The three other houses that made it into the survey's top 10 are the 1995 Price O'Reilly house in Redfern by Engelen Moore, the 2005 Holman House in Dover Heights by Durbach Block, and the 2000 Holyoake House, in Hawthorn, Melbourne, by tUG Workshop. Glenn Murcutt's 1999 Arthur and Yvonne Boyd Art Centre (in association with Reg Lark and Wendy Lewin) at Bundanon was chosen overall as the "number one" building in Australia, while Murcutt had three other house nominations in the survey's top 100.

© 2007 Sydney Morning Herald

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