Jury Citation
Image: Patrick Bingham-Hall
Image: Patrick Bingham-Hall
Sitting splendidly on a rocky rise in a tough, harsh landscape, this house inhabits its site as if it belongs to it.
An angular skeletal frame and warped planes give a strong sense of the building being poised to take flight over the vastness of the wilderness that it surveys.
The house responds to its peculiar and harsh Top End climate and demonstrates a clear understanding of how to produce comfortable architecture in a hot climate. Steel, corrugated iron, glass and timber louvres, fly screens and slatted timber floors have all been skilfully assembled to allow air, breezes and light to flow through. In its detail, the house is robust; it is highly responsive to the invasive fauna and climatic vagaries that characterise this region. The house provides equally for passive or direct engagement with land, flora, fauna and weather. Distinctions between inside and outside are blurred to the point that the essential experience is of the house as a generous verandah.
Designed for a single person who also works from the home, the house is like a work in progress – a truly successful alignment of the work of the architect with the client’s evolving view of this part of the country and his tentative engagement with it.
The architect was challenged to produce a work poised between being an ephemeral shelter and permanent digs. The result is a piece of architecture-in-the-raw in an almost surreal landscape. The house is a gem. It belongs in its landscape and appears as the right response for the needs of its owner.
Credits
- Project
- Rozak House
- Architect
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Adrian Welke
- Consultants
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Builder
J M Tag Building Contractors
Structural consultant Coless & O'Neill
- Site Details
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Location
Noonamah,
Darwin,
NT,
Australia
- Project Details
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Status
Built
Category Residential
Type New houses
