Poetics of everyday: Knight Wilson

James Knight and Daniel Wilson, founding partners of Gold Coast- and Melbourne-based architecture practice Knight Wilson, are keenly aware of the stifling effects of pervasive obligations for originality. Compulsions to be original facilitate architecture’s perversion into a mode of conspicuous consumption, distract from substantive issues of a building’s performance and effects, and regress into endless cavalcades of mere fashions. Knight Wilson’s considered rejection of these compulsions is part of a broader sensibility that has – promisingly – found its way into pockets of contemporary Australian architecture. This sensibility centres on a particular attitude towards everyday built fabric: the recognition that aesthetic delight can be wrought from everyday elements and modes of ordering, and the acceptance that such architectural work might appear anonymous or go unnoticed. Knight Wilson, alongside other practices adopting this attitude, explore mannered inflections and playful expertise within familiar languages of ordinary buildings, while contributing critical and considered reflections on everyday life.

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Cooroy House is oriented to the landscape and northern sun, creating a grander entry and entertaining space.

Image: Knight Wilson

Knight Wilson’s Cooroy House, designed in collaboration with Henry Bennett, exemplifies this attitude. It appears, from many angles, as a simple, locally familiar, rectilinear volume with a hipped roof. The house is clad in ordinary weatherboards, shaded by eaves with generic guttering, and meets the ground on posts in a more-or-less commonplace manner. However, though it might occasionally appear as just another typical lightweight, rural dwelling, the architects’ hands are quietly at work to make considered and effective divergences from this norm. A number of atypical excisions are made from the typical building form: orienting it to the landscape and northern sun, creating a grander entry and entertaining space, defining a guest pavilion, and opening up an outdoor room. The house becomes a sequence of distinct spatial and environmental conditions, each with specific affordances and seasonal valences for their occupants. In a subtle but elegant gesture, a single square highlight window recurs throughout this sequence of rooms, each iteration framing a different view. This simple motif emphasizes the unique conditions of each space, while simultaneously becoming a refrain that unites them within the single identity of the home.

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Stackable Furniture (2018) is a series of Victorian ash timber seats and step stools.

Image: Yaseera Moosa

The concerns here are with the everyday lives of occupants, framed by the latent poetics of everyday buildings. Knight Wilson join contemporaries like Zuzana and Nicholas, Richard Stampton, Joshua Duncan, Andrew Power, and Baracco and Wright in shirking heroic, exceptionalist, or idiosyncratic gestures that act as obtrusive expressions of an architectural author. It is reassuring to see Knight Wilson honing this most promising strain of contemporary Australian architecture.

Most inspiring space you’ve been to? It’s hard to narrow this down to just one, but the State Library of Queensland by Donovan Hill and Peddle Thorp is an incredible building. It’s a great reference for how architecture can offer a strong relationship to its context and climate, flexibility of use, and a generous contribution to the public realm.

It’s your ultimate design dinner party – which four guests are you inviting? Anupama Kundoo, Geoffrey Bawa, Richard Leplastrier, Alvar Aalto – they each have a locally specific and lasting design sensibility.

Favourite design quote? We like Lacaton & Vassal’s approach – “Never demolish, never remove or replace, always add, transform, and reuse!” We hope this will become more commonplace and feasible across the industry.