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Working Drawing House
Working Drawing House
Saint Kilda, Australia
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Other Projects by Nervegna Reed Architecture
Working Drawing House
Saint Kilda, Australia
Type
STATUS
Built
YEAR
1998
SIZE
0 sqft - 1000 sqft
BUDGET
$500K - 1M
The Working Drawing House (1998)
Melbourne was home to the birth of the feature film in 1906. The film ‘The Story of the Kelly Gang’ (Tait 1906) had a running time of over an hour. Much of this movie was filmed in St Kilda, the same suburb in which we designed the Working Drawing House in 1996-8. The knowledge of the importance of this cinematic moment, locally and to world cinema, infected our initial thought process when designing the house.
In the WD House we experimented with the idea of linking the free plan of Loos and Le Corbusier with the cinematic. The interior was manipulated in section as much as possible for the tight site in order to create a sense of the tracking through space inside the house. We endeavoured to make the circulation through the house as fluid and complex as possible, like a Samuel Fuller or Orson Welles tracking shot. The front and back of the house, which was in a small St Kilda site, have the notations from the working drawing inscribed at 1:1 scale in reflective road-sign tape. This defines a sense of ephemerality at the barrier of the cantilevered cube.
The exterior of the cube becomes like a screen, almost a credit sequence, which you pass through into a varied interior experience which is spatially complex but simple in its surface treatments. The interior surfaces are readymade off-the-shelf warehouse style plywood mixed with the modernist cube.
The WD House was imagined as a screen for living. There was an 8m height limit within which we had to fit three levels and car parking. We excavated half a level down for the basement car park and studio. The main living, dining and kitchen floor is a split level to fit over the parking ramp. For this level the whole site is the room, starting on ground level in the garden and cascading upwards to the lounge which overlooks the street. The dining/kitchen area is lower with a closer connection to the rear garden. The demarcation of space is subdued and favours a continuous flow, like a constantly moving camera. Spatially the whole site becomes part of a continuous room, for both the main living level but also to the studio level below. The three bedroom are on the top level. The arrangement and the flow of spaces throughout the site gives a cinematic flow to the everyday life inside.
Melbourne was home to the birth of the feature film in 1906. The film ‘The Story of the Kelly Gang’ (Tait 1906) had a running time of over an hour. Much of this movie was filmed in St Kilda, the same suburb in which we designed the Working Drawing House in 1996-8. The knowledge of the importance of this cinematic moment, locally and to world cinema, infected our initial thought process when designing the house.
In the WD House we experimented with the idea of linking the free plan of Loos and Le Corbusier with the cinematic. The interior was manipulated in section as much as possible for the tight site in order to create a sense of the tracking through space inside the house. We endeavoured to make the circulation through the house as fluid and complex as possible, like a Samuel Fuller or Orson Welles tracking shot. The front and back of the house, which was in a small St Kilda site, have the notations from the working drawing inscribed at 1:1 scale in reflective road-sign tape. This defines a sense of ephemerality at the barrier of the cantilevered cube.
The exterior of the cube becomes like a screen, almost a credit sequence, which you pass through into a varied interior experience which is spatially complex but simple in its surface treatments. The interior surfaces are readymade off-the-shelf warehouse style plywood mixed with the modernist cube.
The WD House was imagined as a screen for living. There was an 8m height limit within which we had to fit three levels and car parking. We excavated half a level down for the basement car park and studio. The main living, dining and kitchen floor is a split level to fit over the parking ramp. For this level the whole site is the room, starting on ground level in the garden and cascading upwards to the lounge which overlooks the street. The dining/kitchen area is lower with a closer connection to the rear garden. The demarcation of space is subdued and favours a continuous flow, like a constantly moving camera. Spatially the whole site becomes part of a continuous room, for both the main living level but also to the studio level below. The three bedroom are on the top level. The arrangement and the flow of spaces throughout the site gives a cinematic flow to the everyday life inside.
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