Commendation for Housing

Descrpition
This is a weekend house/studio for a photographer and his partner. It is a simple three level, three room house sited on the side of a sand dune. This country’s unequivocal political and economic acceptance of its region has permanently changed the face of our nation. These circumstances offer architects in Australia a chance to work within a unique social dynamic where our European history is placed alongside our regional reality and where our responsibility as a profession is to respond to this situation. The east/west hybrid explored in the architect’s “Kew House” is further investigated here. In particular this building focuses on the verandah/aisle and its potential as an iconic element common between eastern and western architecture. The Carter/Tucker House seeks to identify an architecture appropriate to the make up of our unfolding democracy, rather that one which dwells sentimentally on our past or which is seduced by the digital technology of the present.

Jury Vertict
This inventive, rectangular, three level (bedroom/bath, living/eating, roof deck) holiday house is located in a small, west coast holiday village an hour from Melbourne and set on a typically “shacked” strip development. The house sits below the dune line on a steep slope overlooking wetlands to the north and ignores its Howard Arkley villa context with determined aesthetic independence, spirit and crafted swagger. The structure consists of a series of braced steel portal frames holding operable framed glazed walls and is completely screened with external horizontal framed cedar battens which open as flaps on gas struts, according to the season. The internal spaces have a simple, north Asian organisation which complements what is an engaging exercise in modernist rusticality and laconic Australian innovation.

Images: Earl Carter