Richard Stampton Architects . Christy Bryar Architect . photos: © Rory Gardiner
Australian bushland, in all its diverse forms, is complex and evocative. To place a building within and, unavoidably, destroy part of this landscape is a troubling prospect for any architect. In the latter decades of the twentieth century, luminaries of Australian architecture began to distil a language of building that seemed comfortable and somewhat convincingly appropriate within this natural context. Figures like Glenn Murcutt and Richard Leplastrier drew on a diverse set of references, but notably from a modest, lightweight, rural Australian vernacular. Their architecture rallied under mantras like “touch the earth lightly”, and became characterised by exposed steel and timber frames, layers of corrugated steel and plywood, carefully crafted and often intricate junctions between componentry, large and numerous windows with haptic, operable shading devices, deep eaves reaching out from expressive, sheltering roof forms, large expanses of decking, and often all raised up off the earth on
post footings. In legitimising moments, most notably Murcutt’s lauding as a Pritzker Prize laureate,
this language became cemented as the authoritatively ‘appropriate’ architectural response to Australian bushland and the peculiarities of ‘the region’.
These were and are beautifully wrought works of architecture. However, so convincing were they that they were quickly aped by the rest of the profession. A mode of architecture defined, in part, by the sensitivity of its response to highly specific conditions was translated by its emulators into a somewhat dogmatic, underthought, and generic approach to this formidable task of placing a building in the Australian bushland. It is this milieu that gives Richard Stampton’s Yanakie House its particular significance within the landscape of Australian architecture. It is a highly refined and considered response to its bushland context, though notably distinct from those earlier works that begat the now-dominant architectural lineage. In making its way down an alternative track, this house at Yanakie suggests the possibility of widening the slowly narrowing range of responses to building in the bush.
The reasons for this divergence at Yanakie are, in the first instance, pragmatic rather than ideological: a lightweight, open dwelling is simply not feasible on a site of such high bushfire danger.
Nevertheless, the outcome of these practical necessities still serves to challenge the rather narrow conformity to these earlier paradigms and reopens the question – though it may be unanswerable – of how one ought to build within Australian bushland. This response to the coastal bushland context at Yanakie lies in architectural devices that work to construct common ground, shared qualities, continuities, and ways of bringing occupants into contact with the natural surroundings. In doing so, the house emphasises and draws our attention to the peculiarities of its context in ways that are unlike the rehashed tropes of contemporary Australian architecture, diversifying the manner in which architecture might broaden our sensitivities and understanding of this landscape.
The house is not a single building but, rather, a cluster of cylinders, varying in height and diameter, some quite close together and others up to half a dozen or so metres apart. These grey rammed earth and concrete structures accommodate the dispersed programme of the dwelling: two cylinders contain bedrooms; one is a bathroom and sauna; the largest provides a kitchen, dining, and living
room; the smallest serves as a storeroom; and four are water tanks, scattered amongst the rooms. This disintegration of the building has an obvious consequence: to move amongst the spaces of the house is to move through and experience the conditions of the surrounding bush, to hear the raucous screech of cockatoos drowning out the crunch of dried leaves underfoot, to catch the smell of the eucalypts, or to feel the first drops of rain on a dash back to a bedroom. The kind of continuity with the bushland that is being orchestrated here is not just a matter of bringing these unique sensory experiences into the space of the home, it is allowing the conditions of the bush – its patterns of light, weather, and seasons – to have a greater influence on the timing and rhythms of domestic life.
Separated out into this cluster of discrete structures, with no obvious pattern to their placement, the house loses any discernible boundary. As a result, there is no clear sense of when one has crossed the threshold into the area that should be called ‘the house’ – and, equally, of when one has left the surrounding bush. This blurring of boundaries is further heightened by the way that these clustered forms establish a sense of continuity with the bushland through their shared spatial qualities and commonalities in visual experience. To move through forested bushland is to move amongst clusters of irregularly positioned tree trunks and the foliage of lower vegetation, both of which work to obscure vision but then, at times, align in such a way that sightlines cut through this disorder to farther vistas. Vision alternates between being shortened, lengthened, then shortened again. The same is true of the clustering of structures that make up the house. Walking towards, around, or through these, they, at times, obscure any views past the group, until suddenly a sightline opens up through them, some even aligning with breaks in the surrounding vegetation towards the coast beyond.
A ‘typical’ house – that is, one enclosed within a single envelope – obviously does not share these qualities. It also possesses a quality that is radically different from both bushland and Stampton’s Yanakie House. With a clear edge, and especially with rectilinear shapes, comes an implied front, back, and sides. With these comes a discernable directionality, of primary and secondary axes. In contrast, bushland is without axial directionality and frontality of this kind (though it has its own kinds of orientation). The same can be said of the house at Yanakie. Without any clear front or direction, it presents no break from these spatial qualities of the surrounding bushland. Its circular (non- directional) forms heighten this characteristic, and the effects of elements like doors (which might work to suggest a front and direction) are countered by their multiplicity and varying orientations on each of the occupiable structures.
There is little in these structures, from their exterior, that evokes the image of ‘house’. Indeed, from many angles, they are far closer to resembling storage tanks or some other kind of infrastructural outbuilding. These banal semblances are yet another manner in which the house seems more appropriate to or part of its natural surroundings. Coming across an infrastructural building while on a walk through the bush is notably distinct from happening upon a house. The former, though obviously in no way natural, often seems to be much more a part of the landscape than a structure that is evidently a dwelling. Whether they are tanks, minor substations, powerpoles, or storage sheds, these kinds of structures have an apparent disregard to human registers in their form and scale in just the same way that natural landscapes and their features have an apparent indifference to human bodies and activities. Similarly, while a house within bushland stakes out a clearing to be occupied (and, in turn, is laden with connotations of ownership), infrastructural buildings seem more akin with the
features of the landscape in so far as they seem unattuned to human occupation. At Yanakie, the blankness of the facades, the uncertainty of what might be a door, and the fact that occupiable rooms are scattered amongst unoccupiable tanks and stores all serve to construct this infrastructure- and landscape-like indifference to interiority and occupation (even if, hidden within, the house offers a comfortable, embracing domesticity).
Alongside these evocations of rather mute, utilitarian outbuildings, the house also carries connotations of far more archaic structures. From certain angles, perhaps with the right light, the apparently solid, monolithic appearance of the stone-like rammed earth cylinders and the peculiar way they are scattered on the site can’t help but bring to mind megaliths, standing stone circles, or fragments of ancient ruins. These archaic remnants – and, by invoking them, these structures at Yanakie – have a unique quality that, again, draws them into a closer relationship with the natural landscape than with domestic buildings. In their apparent age, their obscure (perhaps lost) meaning, and their solidity and permanence, they seem more in step with the geological and ecological timescales of the natural landscape than with the fleeting, routine temporalities of domestic life and buildings. This apparent age of archaic structures is, in part, a result of the way that they are entwined with natural bodies – ruins look like picturesque parts of the landscape because of the way that nature has encroached upon and partially reclaimed them. As the native vegetation that weaves between the rooms at Yanakie grows higher and denser, they too seem to take on these timescales.
There is a complex ambiguity here at Yanakie, one that isn’t present in a house that gives over as much as possible to a continuity between interior and exterior – to “blend the inside and outside” – as has become so typical in contemporary Australian work. Though these rooms at Yanakie may establish specific and strong forms of continuity and commonalities with the surrounding bushland, there is also a dramatic division between their interior and the surrounding exterior. Contrary to “bringing the outside in” through tired gestures of maximum glazing under skillion roofs, in this house there is a striking exclusion of unbridled views. In most rooms, the outside is only visible through relatively narrow vertical slits cut into massive earthen walls. From the inside, there is a direct opposition to exposure, and from the outside the rooms look, from some angles, impenetrable.
Indeed, the metal screens encrusted over the cylinders appear – in the way they are folded, and their perforations – to be almost armour-like, as if protecting something precious within from a threatening exterior. This is a house that manages to both cultivate continuity, exposure, and connection, but also seclusion, protection, domesticity, and retreat when needed – each through different means. By creating both, each heightens the sense of the other.
Balancing this dichotomy within the house seems entirely appropriate. It is a nuanced position to take within this vexed problem of how to build within bushland: it works with an awareness that no building can ever be completely appropriate, harmonious, or continuous with a context like this. More importantly, a building also generates disruptions and destruction – often unintentional and unavoidable – and ought not to attempt to veil this through espoused unity with its surroundings.
Though a careful work of architecture may establish diverse and deep connections with bushland it will always stand as fundamentally distinct and apart from this natural context. Stampton’s Yanakie House suggests how architecture might work to manifest these irresolvable dualities and the problematic status of a building in the Australian bush. Its success lies in being able to still draw out the complex and subtle beauty, wistful moments of quiet and absence, sublime age, and enlivening youth of the bush, all in an attempt to find home in this landscape.
Thomas Essex-Plath 03.2024
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