Designers at Home | John Wardle
Burnt Earth appears almost like a natural phenomenon, an extension of the adjacent coastal cliff face. In reality, it is the meticulously crafted – custom brick by custom brick – vision of architect and owner John Wardle.
John Wardle is no stranger to the process of designing to his own brief; Burnt Earth marks the sixth time that he has designed for himself and his family. Previous projects include the acclaimed Shearers Quarters and Captain Kelly’s Cottage, both on his farm on Bruny Island, Tasmania, and his former home in Kew, Melbourne, which he renovated three times over as many decades. He describes these personal projects as pivotal to his studio’s work more broadly, with “some aspects of each infused into the practice”. In the most recent case of Burnt Earth, completed in 2023 and designed during the Covid-19 pandemic, the project represented an entirely new way of working for Wardle and his team.
Located in Anglesea on the Bellarine Peninsula, an hour and a half from Melbourne, the site was inaccessible for the entire design process due to Victoria’s stringent pandemic travel restrictions. “We are always fascinated by the surrounds of a particular site, not just the site itself,” says Wardle – the landscape, built context and available light and views all represent integral design parameters. In the absence of the usual site visits, he resorted to digitally mapping both the site and its surroundings, something the practice also came to do on major public buildings underway at that time, including Bendigo Law Courts and the final in a series of buildings designed for the University of Tasmania. For this extremely personal project, such mapping actually enabled a highly precise connection to the site despite the physical separation, allowing the home’s orientation and openings to be finely calibrated in response to the views and path of the sun.
The resulting building reflects this quite literally, in both plan and spatial geometry. “For me, it’s an unusual house plan; spatially it’s not one that I’ve ever done before,” says Wardle. “A common theme in our work is a linear arrangement [of spaces]. This is almost a cruciform shape. It records the relationship between the ingress of light and the ingress of view corridors to the landscape and beyond to the ocean.” Following the comprehensive digital mapping process, he hand-sketched the alignments of the views and sun, resulting in spaces that seem to reach outward, drawing the eye beyond the site’s bounds and bringing light deep into the plan, even as the walls simultaneously feel as though they are holding their occupants close.
These subtly contrasting gestures outward and inward enliven the building with an almost kinetic energy that reflects the idea of a weekender as a place of gathering and social connection. Wardle observes that “the social centre of a beach house is the kitchen – a beach house often has different kinds of communal activity and one, certainly in our family, is of many contributors to making a meal.” As such, the kitchen in Burnt Earth is placed right at the centre of the plan, with the two primary cross axes running precisely through the middle of the island. This space also forms the primary egress to the main outdoor social space, the courtyard. While both the living and dining areas border this courtyard too, the inhabitants must access it from the kitchen – and, indeed, they must also pass through it en route to any other part of the house, making the cooking zone the central hub of activity.
The coastal influence – in particular the geology of the area – is also felt in the materiality of the building. Anglesea, a small town Wardle has been visiting since he was a child, is famous for the towering rust-coloured cliffs that line the beach. “Around 100 years ago, a massive landslip commenced on the coastline and ran right up to exactly the front of our house,” he says, “so the house has a strong landscape connection through this slipped landfall down to the coastal edge – we’re not on the coast, but we’re very much part of the experience of the coast. We wanted to take that character, the material of clay and the colour and tonality and even the texture of that cliff face and draw that into the elevation of the house.”
The material most typically associated with beach houses is timber, but Wardle explains that this project led the studio’s move toward a careful, more frugal use of timber. “We have shifted as a practice; if you look at our work over many years, you’ll see our love of solid timber, but we feel that we must be much more careful with our use of it. This project was the start of this revised process.” The immediate question, then, was what material could take its place. Following an extensive research phase, the architects landed upon terracotta as an ancient natural material that is, like timber, similarly “universal in human appreciation in cultures all around the world”.
Fortuitously, terracotta brick offered an intrinsic connection with the cliffs that loomed so large in the brief. Concerned that brick felt more appropriate to an urban than a coastal setting, however, Wardle worked closely with longtime collaborator Krause Bricks to design a unique brick that was extruded and hand-torn to create a textured, undulating surface quite distinct from typical brickwork. No two are alike, and this natural variation is further enhanced by a glaze experimentally applied to the raw material, resulting in a lichen-esque colour variance that both charts the testing process and recalls the tonality of the surrounding vegetation.
The overall built form also emphasises the connection with the site. Not only does the sheer, monolithic facade reference the cliff face, but the massing shifts from single-storey to double-height in tandem with the topography, which undergoes dramatic level changes, shaped by landslides and coastal erosion. Above, the entire roof is one single plane, angled down to a huge terracotta-clad spout at the lowest corner. At times, rainfall pours forth onto a large rock below, before flowing into a pond. The spout itself is adorned with a cantilevered nestbox – an offering to the tawny frogmouths Wardle observed peering with characteristic disapproval down at the construction site. The box became yet another research project for the practice, and while this revealed that tawny frogmouths do not, in fact, use nestboxes, the whimsical idea prevailed, and Wardle worked with furniture maker Vivienne Wong to create a box with a variety of frontages that are changed seasonally in hope of one taking the liking of a future avian inhabitant.
While the dramatic coastal landscape that informs so much of the architecture is the product of massive natural forces, Burnt Earth is the work of many hands and delights in expressing these human touches. The custom-made bricks and bespoke nestbox are but two of many such examples. The terracotta tiles and bath were produced by Cotto Manetti – Italian terracotta specialists dating back to the Renaissance and close collaborators with Wardle over many projects. The art collection is made up of pieces by the Wardle family’s friends and associates. The dining and coffee tables were designed by the architect for a 2022 exhibition, ‘Relatively Useful’, at Heide Museum of Modern Art that was held in collaboration with furniture designer Simon Lloyd. The outdoor table pays homage to the tiled furniture by Jørn Utzon at Can Lis, one of Wardle’s formative architectural influences. Folded steel joinery elements were crafted by Amore Made, another of his ongoing collaborators, and the enormous shutters that open and close the building according to its occupation were the result of lengthy research and development work with Tilt Industrial Design.
As Wardle’s latest personal project, Burnt Earth represents a culmination, providing not only an opportunity to test new ideas and ways of working but, most importantly, a means to extend the architect’s ongoing appreciation for place and for craft. Drawing on deep connections many years in the making with both the site and numerous designers, artists, makers and manufacturers, “there is a close association with just about everything throughout the home,” he says. “In one way or another, everything tells the story of a relationship.”
Architecture by Wardle. Build by Spence Construction. Landscape construction by Brett Essing Landscapes. Tiles by Artedomus. Artwork by Christine Healy, Philip Hunter, Emma Jackson, Veronica Kent, Simon Lloyd, Simon Perry, Julia Ritson, Gareth Samson and Pedro Wonaeamirri.
- 转载自：The Local Project
- 图片@The Local Project
- 语言：英语
- 编辑：序赞网
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