ARCHITECTURE

This band of architects is in good form, with their lyrical, flowing public buildings and residences winning fans worldwide.

Durbach Block Jaggers – legends in urban design.

ARCHITECTS DURBACH BLOCK JAGGERS have a section on their website called ‘lately’, which could also, less poetically, be titled ‘work in progress’. The line-up of projects underway, not to mention those recently completed, is remarkable in terms of the expressive opportunities they afford and speak clearly of the practice’s soaring creative confidence.

One such commission is Phoenix, a performance space in Chippendale, which forms part of philanthropist and White Rabbit Gallery founder Judith Neilson’s growing presence in the inner-city suburb. “It is a tremendous project made even more so by the fact that the client is incredibly enlightened and incredibly trusting. The project is testament to transformative thinking,” says Camilla Block. Furniture designer Khai Liew has acted in a curatorial role bringing John Wardle Architects to design a gallery space, and artist Janet Laurence a connecting courtyard. Much is shared in the project – the north facade, the courtyard and how the buildings connect and are used – so the elements need to converse with one another in an intelligent way. Trust and humour are the way in which this is best navigated says Block.

Durbach Block Jaggers, in conjunction with John Wardle, have designed handmade bricks, made by Victorian company Krause, which will allow a subtle play of twisting, canting and curving along the exterior wall. The space itself will be raw and sculptural with a beautifully modelled ceiling and provide a flexible and fluid context for performance art. “There is nothing prescriptive about how the space is used. The idea is that it is open, with a series of wide steps so people can move around and interact as suits them,” says Block.

For this interview we sit in the generous rooftop garden of the four-storey building they designed in Sydney’s Potts Point which houses their office and a restaurant. “We encourage clients to have space around their house, in that having a real garden and real sun is a different kind of luxury,” says Block. This was perhaps their first public building and Neil Durbach feels it prepared them in some way for the intense public scrutiny around the North Bondi Surf Club.

The practice skilfully manages the context of projects – be it Droga Apartment’s gritty urban quality, the suburban ugliness around Tamarama House or the surf club’s iconic site. Durbach calls on Edmund Burke’s theories of beauty as they apply to the club. “Its lightness makes it seductive, it is small, compressed... , rounded and has the continuously changing quality of the play of light on the tiled surfaces.”

Intimate scale is important to the practice with the intention to make a huge program seem as small as possible. For Sydney’s University of Technology they designed a science research and education building with architects BVN that is extraordinarily sculptural and sustainable (six-star Green Star rating). “We kept thinking of it as the equivalent of designing 10 houses which we then put together,” says Durbach.

One house that was composed with the ease of a Mozart sonata was the now world-famous Holman House. Online design website Dezeen named it as one of the nine most popular houses in its history. Block points to the beauty of the site, while Durbach feels it carries both the romanticism of living in a bird’s nest and an embodiment of several architectural references. “Photographically, it certainly has a number of heroic moments,” says Block. “But the real beauty of this house is the experience of being inside. It shoots well but it ‘lives’ even better.” Visit durbachblockjaggers.com.

Charged with the fit-out of a new cultural centre in Shanghai’s Hongqiao district, architects Neri & Hu took inspiration from tree canopies in the forest and used an arrangement of sticks for the ceiling treatment. In the main exhibition hall of The Performance and Exhibition Centre (right), it contrasts with the smooth concrete forms which reference rock, suggesting an internal landscape.

BRICK WORKS

An interesting architectural practice in the UK at present is Carmody Groarke – principals Andy Groarke and Kevin Carmody studied at RMIT and Canberra University. Its scope of work takes in cultural, heritage, residential and arts projects, including the design of the Abstract Expressionism exhibition currently at London’s Royal Academy of Arts. This recently completed detached house (left and far left) in Highgate, North London, illustrates their restrained monumentality with the sculptural use of brick defining spaces. The large central hall is key with open-plan living areas radiating from it. carmodygroarke.com The collaboration of Pen (the Australian-based product design brand) and Melbourne architect Michael Ong (MODO) has produced an architecturally savvy dog house. Simply shaped, like a child’s drawing, and constructed in plywood (or OSB – oriented strand board) and set in an aluminium frame, it is smart enough for inside or outside use.