Vault magazine Issue 21 – April 2018
Emerging Architecture Practice studioplusthree
Architectural Alternatives
As large and lazy developments come to dominate the housing conversation in Australia, VAULT asks, where are our well-designed antidotes? We spoke to three emerging architecture practices that are revolting against our repetitive inner-city canvases.
Written by Kirsty Sier
Avocado toast, four-dollar coffees and housing bubbles. We've all heard it, and we're all up to the teeth talking about it. The ongoing debate surrounding the issue of Australia's dying property dream -whether that meant a picketed quarter-acre or an inner-city loft - has largely centred on two much-maligned participants: politicians and 'millennials'. But as the affordability debate rages on between these two sides, we're in danger of forgetting what lies at the heart of it: the homes themselves. As our cities become ever denser and as the development boom b~comes ever more lucrative, those who are hungry to live in the city come to accept that their fate will be smaller and less beautiful than the big, bright houses of a century ago- or, they pack up and move to the outskirts, where a verandah and tree shade are not yet anachronisms. Thankfully, there is another piece in the puzzle. More architects and designers are becoming actively engaged in tackling our tricky, shrinking urban blocks. As they prove that good, functional design can be produced from smaller lots, our exposure to what is possible from these spaces leads to less acceptance of our fat-pocketed developers' production lines of lightless plasterboard boxes. If we are to shift the cultural mind set away from the 'bigger is better' mentality that so often thrives in Australia, it's more important than ever for architects to eschew size for quality, and to give city-dwellers positive examples of- and choices between -well-designed buildings. VAULT spoke to three emerging architectural practices that are revolting against the idea of unartful homes, and proving that there is more we can demand of our buildings.
studioplusthree is as much a philosophy collective as it is an architectural practice. We begin our conversation talking not about architecture, but about the physical properties of the human voice. Recently, the three directors of the small, Sydney-based studio - Simon Rochowski, Julin Ang and Joseph Byrne - worked on This is a Voice for the Powerhouse Museum, a collaborative sound art exhibition that saw them interpret speech through architecture. "Exhibitions are a nice middle ground between architecture and art," says Rochowski. "You get to push the boundaries and do things you might not necessarily get to do in something as static as architecture." Yet, this willingness to push boundaries is a lynchpin of studioplusthree's architectural output. One of the practice's recent projects reflects its deep fascination with conceptualisation, fluid boundaries, and functional outcomes.
Llewellyn House involved the renovation of an old Federation house in Marrickville that Ang says is "a really good symbol of the change going on" in Sydney's dense, inner-city areas. The 'before' photographs are enough to make you physically recoil. The interior was dilapidated to the extent that the floors had rotted through and flooded; the only bathroom was coated in a thick patina of unidentifiable black muck; sunlight penetrated approximately nowhere. Byrne says the idea with this project was to buck trends that suggest that more floorspace equals a greater level of liveability. Although much of the home's "rabbit warren'' of rooms was left intact, there is a newly distinct perception of light and space in the reimagined Federation house. "We didn't actually create many more square metres, but we definitely changed the way you could live in the house," says Ang.
One of the more tellingly clever features of the project is the living room at the rear of the lower level, where an adjacent laneway has been "borrowed" to create something midway between living room and courtyard. Beyond the back door, a 4. 9-metre sheet of folded steel has been carefully oriented to reflect sun down the entire middle of the house. For this, studioplusthree chased down a "70-year-old man who lives out in the middle of western Sydney and is the only person still doing this one craft", as Rochowski puts it. This is an apt symbol of studioplusthree's design philosophy: a desire to make old things work in new ways.