Composition with shadows

Using a small range of construction materials expertly placed at the service of light, Godsell gives depth to space and creates rhythmic volumes that reflect the passing of the hours and the seasons, explains Francesco Dal Co.

In 2015, the Sydney Modern competition came to a conclusion, with the purpose of assigning the commission for the construction of a new wing of the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney.

The submitted projects included one developed by Sean Godsell, which we can examine thanks to the drawings he provided for the evaluation of the jury. In these notes, we will focus particularly on those drawings, and on the most challenging work Godsell has built, the RMIT Design Hub in Melbourne (2007–12).

In the materials that accompanied the Art Gallery submission, there are two passages that are worth examining here. The first explains how Godsell intended to “make” the project – that is, to draw it; the second clarifies the model on which he relied to configure the arrangement of the open spaces around the old museum and the new wing, with the aim of attenuating their rhetorical impact. In the first excerpt, we read: “We still believe that god is in the detail. There will be no homogenous, rote or computer file generated components of Sydney Modern. We will design, document and detail this building by hand.” Those who observe these project materials will see that Godsell was true to his word. Drawing every detail of a project by hand, superimposing writing, lines and words to explicitly illustrate what the drawing may not be capable of immediately communicating, breaking down the nodes of a design drawing with sketches, preventing the details of a construction from taking on uncontrolled definitions: these are all characteristics of his way of working. Godsell understands them as part of a program, a “movement of resistance,” he says, opposed to the subjugation of the architectural project to expediency – and the outcome, we might add, of his decision to keep faith with the lesson he learned in his youth, as he observed the drawing board where his father worked and utilized the various drafting tools on which a designer had to rely. For those who comply with this method, the detail is not considered a friend of mechanical reproducibility, and the care that has to be lavished on particulars to obtain good constructive results implies an identification that can only be achieved through drawing by hand. Drawing involves slowness and study, temporal extensions of the dépense that architects prefer to avoid in our time; but drawing is the space of reconsideration, thanks to which invention and appropriateness can meet and combine. Godsell's works, starting from those of the early years – Kew House (1996–97), for example – reflect this attitude and are the results of projects made “the old-fashioned way.”

Significantly, however, the constructions of the Australian architect display none of the aspects usually assumed by architecture when it reappropriates the past as a value – and the project for the museum in Sydney demonstrates this. On this occasion, Godsell has developed his previous experiences and their implications to the point of generating a personal manner, given the unusual dimensions of the work, its urban implications and the need to take into account the proximity of the existing museum building (1896–1909), with its ingenuous but nevertheless representative form. This is also shaded by the impressions gathered from the modes of construction of contemporary Japanese architects, from Kazuo Shinohara to

Kiyoshi Seike, which nimbly exploit timetested conventions in the configuration of houses that are not traditional at all, yet at the same time are indifferent to the temptations of timeliness. The same approach can be seen in Godsell's constructions starting in the second half of the 1990s, as in the case of MacSween House, built in Melbourne in 1995. Following this inclination, for the museum in Sydney Godsell has imagined a volume that is uncompromising in terms of the display of its squared bulk and essential tectonics. Inside the enclosure thus conceived, he has organized separate spaces, to the point of configuring a sort of vaguely labyrinthine sheltered pathway, destined to expand outside on the “platform” that connects the new wing to the old museum.

The arrangement of the spaces outside the museum covered an area

extending from the podium on which the Opera House by Jørn Utzon stands to Woolloomooloo Bay. Godsell has imagined a solution in tune with the rigour that constitutes the earmark of the new wing, which he has designed as a succession of undifferentiated portals atop autonomous volumes, a strategy applied in various other projects, such as those for the pavilion of the Woodleigh School Science Building (1999–2002) and the Peninsula House (2000–02), both on Victoria's Mornington Peninsula. For this reason, he has avoided a naturalistic treatment of the green spaces facing the bay and has hypothesized the conservation of the traces existing there, such as those left by the fuel tanks built during World War II, which are less congruous with the representative character of the museum complex. Making this decision, he has called upon a distant and unexpected reference, mindful of the observations made by Dimitri Pikionis regarding the substantial elusiveness of the ground when it is the sea that shapes its contours – another clue, then, to indicate that Godsell's approach can be positively defined as “old-fashioned.”

But do such clues still apply when we shift our focus from a project like this one for the museum in Sydney to that of the Design Hub for the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in Melbourne? Before attempting to answer this question, it is worth devoting a few words to the ways this latter structure has been built. It too is a block, and its rectangular footprint corresponds to that of the urban lot on which it stands, to a great extent. The enclosure, composed in the previously mentioned cases by rows of trilithic portals, has been treated in an unexpectedly sophisticated manner: slim sections of cylinders with glass form a fabric of points whose pattern can continue to shift in spite of the repetitive character of its parts and alignments.

Each of the circular pieces, in fact, can rotate on the axis that connects it to the metal support structure. Moreover, it has been designed to enable its replacement, in order to grasp the opportunities offered by technological evolution to a cladding conceived to ensure the highest levels of performance in terms of energy saving. The movement of the translucent circles varies the depth of the external surfaces, while the lobate gaps created between the circles allow light to pass through, forming origami-like shadows on the inner walls that vanish with the passing of the hours, producing effects that cannot be imagined simply by observing the exterior of the enclosure.

Thus adorned by the most immaterial of decorations – the reflections of light – the walls have dimensions that tend to expand, because the spaces – those occupied by the vertical accessways and those that contain the exhibition rooms and laboratories – are stretched and taut, similar to screens on which to project the movements of a shadow play. Accompanied by details that express the fascination with conciseness, even to the point of crudeness in other works by Godsell, the claddings of the walls and partitions unify the various functions housed by the building, almost like distinct but interacting parts of a machine, for which the enclosure is an integral part. Just as in the case of the portals designed for the museum in Sydney, so for RMIT it is inappropriate to indicate the external appearance as cladding, since it is more like a stratification. While in a work like Glenburn House (2004–07), which can be considered a forerunner of the project for Sydney, the exoskeleton rhythmically alternates full and empty zones, and the volume is dictated by its elementary tectonics, in the building for RMIT, the outer surfaces are paced by a reflecting geometric weave formed by circular figures that are imperceptible when seen from a certain distance. In this case, the reflections of the light prompt us to imagine the building as being similar to a kaleidoscope, a plaything that demonstrates how the random complexity of bits of coloured glass inside a cylinder can generate a series of symmetrical geometric figures, thanks to the rotation of the mirrors that reflect them.

The translucent walls of the RMIT Design Hub produce a comparable effect when the observer “rotates” around the building, and the fragments of its skin change their appearance in keeping with the angle of the light. In the interiors, the light enters through the gaps that separate the glass disks, involving the rooms in an alternation of light and shadow across the span of the day.

Carried out with unprecedented methods of construction in the RMIT building, this is a design strategy that links all of Godsell's works. To grant consistency to shadow, or to design volumes whose purpose is to give depth to space thanks to the control of light and shadow, is an objective Godsell has pursued in his works, relying on a programmatically limited range of construction materials placed at the service of light. He has also kept faith with this aim in the design of the new museum in Sydney, which – no less than the RMIT building – becomes a demonstration of the fact that the most appropriate expression of the meaning Godsell attributes to the term “design” is composition with shadows.