and new contemporary houses in the neighbourhood, defining them as flat roofed, cleanly articulated, stucco covered masses and then showed them that we are doing a flat roof, cleanly articulated, stucco covered mass. The document that we created is a little essay on how prevalent modernism is in that neighbourhood that they like so much. All kinds of things trickle down from modernist architecture, so it was a matter of making it clear that those things exist and that’s the vocabulary that we are planning on using. Having said that I think this house goes a step beyond that which we didn’t clearly articulate. One of the main walls of this house is glass and the stucco is going to be pre-cast concrete panels. Tom : So, you defined the clearest and most recognizable modern condi - tions in the neighbourhood and presented the house in terms of those conditions. Andrew: Essentially we were playing poker with them. They said, ‘the house is not appropriate, what are you going to do to the house to change it?’ We said ‘we’re not going to change the house at
all, but we’re going to convince you that the house is appropriate’. If that argument had been unconvincing then we’d have to go back and change the house, but we spent a lot of effort in the argument. We didn’t dumb it down, we talked about various architectural elements, we talked about horizontality. It was all formal, it wasn’t conceptual and theoretical, but we didn’t dumb it down, partly to show them that we know what we’re talking about, we’re trained, we’re university professors. Tom:Was there an intention to educate here? Andrew: I don’t think the City is worth educating, I don’t think the neighbours are worth educating. If you’ve got a client that wants us to design a house for them and they didn’t know much about architecture — well, they know a lot more about architecture now just going through the process. They know a lot more about the difference between building, architecture and critical architecture — even the fact that those three conditions exist. I’m not sure if they’d use us again to make a building because I think they are frustrated by the
T ransformations
O n S ite review
45
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator