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NEWMAN HOUSE 2

Richard Goodw

There is the drama of the coast road south, then sharp right and up the hill towards the escarpment squeezing you between cliff and sea. Newman house2 nestles below the road, its shed rooves blade-like from the boundary walls hail both mountain and sea. First contact with the house reveals pale concrete walls, wings of steel and the attenuated alimentary canal of the home. The journey in takes you past the living areas, an open court, and culminates in bedrooms nestled within the remaining hand of the wall. The combinations are appropriate - heavy masses with skeletal frames reaching out to encase function. The siting is near perfect, maximising the land to the north with the net sense of both large building and large land mass when in fact both are average. The material palette is limited to steel and concrete in the modernist tradition with the inflection of timber in floors and tables. Grose Bradley handle steel with a corporate sense of detailing, showing innovation and confidence but still managing to make it appropriate for a home. The preference for cruciform steel sections and the expression of webs and flanges, coupled with finely riveted ripple iron, are manipulated for shadows and controlled complexity which breaks down the scale of the elements and creates intimacy. Newman house 2 is another example of this firms virtuosity when it comes to housing and lifestyle. Grose Bradley is one of a number of prominent architectural firms who are building on the legacy of Glen Murcutt but looking for even more clues for expression in their work. It is in relation to notions of expression that I wish to concentrate this article.

In the recent Croquis publication Frank Gehry 1991-95 he is asked to comment about context. I was drawn to two comments he made.

and later, when questioned regarding his flamboyant design for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, he says:

So this language of contextualisation makes a paradigm shift from the "organic style" days of hugging the site in a deferential manner and reacting in material and orientation to the physical qualities of site, climate and lifestyle.

Newman house 2 by Grose Bradley Architects poses an interesting conundrum in relation to this topic. In orientation and siting it does all that the "Sydney School" would have wanted. The architects themselves refer to "engagement" of the site and the qualities of light and horizon in Australia. The house is built in a conservation zone and had to be a valid "rural" form. However, GB call on the building's metaphorical quality. They describe it as a mine shaft with its wedge-like action, slicing into the earth.

So why the conundrum? Well, its to do with metaphor, and its to do with expression. On one hand the mine or earth of this building, from which its figurative steel elements spring to provide amenity, is bold and dynamic but it neither confines you or contains you. The metaphor is too polite. On the other hand one feels the irresistible urge of the artist to place two sculptural elements in a way which imparts context with its own negative or positive energy.

Newman house 2 is a well crafted sculptural building owing its form to the aesthetics of minimalism and an expression of the site. The building is about facing north and the view, about outside coming in. In physical terms the building is two walls- two marks. The journey is attenuated- its dynamism a product of the triangle the walls make. But on going in, one is out. This action is exquisitely handled in plan as you arrive outside at the terrace with the dual choice of going into the living or dormitory areas. Yet the materiality of the walls seems diminished by its openness to the sky. I guess I just want these wonderful walls to be more. Mine shafts in the area were originally lined with concrete but that correlation alone does not make these walls mine-like. This is a modernist incursion into the landscape with a condom on.

When I think about Wollongong I think, as GB have done, about mines and metal, about sheer cliff and long range view. GB have produced a masterful home, using materials sympathetic to the locality, using qualities of building which humble themselves to the site. I also think about another Wollongong, which knows what it is to spill a bit of blood on the fibro after soccer, to eat a vegemite sandwich on chrome, green, pink laminex, to stumble in muddy sandshoes on broken glass, to labour in the fire between steel sheets.

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