Author: studiospgd

In particular, Peter, a neighbour, who has been making handrails for our projects for some years. A skilled craftsman and retired marine electrical engineer who, among other hobbies restores engines for old Austin 7’s. He has the sort of practical mind and skills to give anything a crack (including inventing a tensioning device for oyster lines…)

Anyway I was talking to Peter one day about a project we were doing and somehow ended up discussing how to detail connections on a handrail made from 16mm brass we wanted to make. The next day Peter knocked on my door with an idea and he’d bent a bit of aluminium bar and tapped a thread in to show you could make a strong connection without braising.

Before you knew it he was giving the rail a crack in brass on the actual project. He fashioned brackets from brass pipe sleeved over the threaded rod, found some brass washers at Bunnings that he machined to make a neat plate at the post connection and then tapped thread into the handrail bar to get a secure fixing.

It was a pain to install and get the bend right round the winder (using a plumbers pipe bender) and he swore never to do one again!

We are now on to our 6th handrail and have the method down pat on all sorts of conditions.

Cheers Peter – you’re a legend!

‘Re-wilding’ is core to many new public landscapes world over – parks and reserves are often now designed highly attuned to Country and place.

Stubbornly, however, there remains a suburban ideal that we need to maximise everything within the boundary of our residential properties with minimal maintenance. The largest area of flat lawn is ‘needed’ for kids to play on, leaving a thin space for landscape screening on the fence line to block out neighbours’ houses.

If we instead see landscape as an act of repair and connection – a gesture that that can give rather than take, a new pathway opens. A garden can be seen as part of a bigger eco-system which can have a much greater meaning and impact in our home and lives.

Part of the site investigations for our projects explore endemic landscapes in the area.  Research of traditional land can also offer a clue as to what may have been on the site in a pre-colonial past. We begin with the conception of a ‘pre-existing’ landscape and then design a building to respond.  Plant species that have sustained a balanced eco-system for thousands of years can be re-introduced in a small act of repair and result in a building that feels tuned to its surroundings.

Japanese landscape sees a garden as a ‘world in miniature’ – rocks are mountains, moss a forest, planting placed so deliberately to offer a meditative and reflective connection to nature.  Explorer and art historian Langdon Warner (the inspiration for the Indiana Jones character) observed that Japanese gardens are designed “to express the highest truths of religion and philosophy precisely as other civilisations have made use of the arts of literature and philosophy”.

What would an Australian ‘world in miniature’ look like, and what should it represent?  It needs to manage torrential rain, drought, provide protection from beating sun – it can have gulleys and rainforest, scrub and bush.  Swimming pools can become waterholes with planting providing natural shade.  Creek beds can allow water to flow through a site in a controlled way, providing adventurous spaces for kids to explore.  A view to a distant hill can feel like an extension of our own back yard or a window seat look out on to the flowering Grevillia alive with Lorikeets.

If a house can re-connect with nature, it can play a small role in reminding us of the that we are a small part of a bigger system. Perhaps the role of domestic landscape in our contemporary lives is to distract us from self-obsession.  To provide us the space to sit, watch the birds and butterflies, and reflect on our place in the natural world.

 

KG

in 2018 we were invited to participate in a travelling exhibition curated by Architecture, Design and Art Practice Training Research (ADAPT-r project), a partnership of seven European universities including RMIT Europe and Bond University in Queensland.  DAP-r explains the brief of the ‘Practice in a box’ as such:

A collection of archival A4 boxes displaying the work and practice of emerging and established architecture and design practitioners, the exhibition addresses a core question: what knowledge and insights do creative practitioners produce? To reply to and articulate this core question, the project invites early stage and established practitioners to create within a box an artefact – a model, sound, object, video, installation – which embodies or expresses the knowledge their research produces. Accompanied by a textual explication, each artefact is the result of a research-making process, while the box itself represents the practice-based PhD model as a container or framework within which practitioners can build their research.

KGA Submission

The thunder was surprisingly far away – it was one of those night time electrical storms that has the sky dancing with lightning.  It was so wild and raw you could feel it running down your neck. 

I snuck into the children’s bedroom to make sure they hadn’t woken up.  Our son was asleep but our daughter was stood up with the curtain behind her back and her face pressed to the window.  Where her body had pushed the curtain away from the sill, the brilliant flashes of lightning illuminated her pink pyjamas and the floor around her feet.  I could imagine her wide eyes taking in the spectacle beyond.  At that moment it was just the storm and her.

Our buildings – mainly houses, are informed by many different threads and narratives interwoven into a moment where they find form. The thread that links the occupant to the site, place and beyond is a recurring and pressing one; the idea that Architecture can be an armature to the poetics of the universe, curating the space between the curtain and storm.

Our ‘artefact’ is an armature through which to view some images of our work and process.  A personal experience that may provide a connection to our intentions, care and craft of making.

 

Image 1, 2, 6 taken from the DAP-r website

KG