Home on the range

DECEPTIVELY simple buildings that blend into the landscape have taken top honours in this year's AIA awards.

PURE poetry is how the jury in this year's Australian Institute of Architects National Awards described the 2012 winner of the Robin Boyd Award for Residential Architecture. The Shearer's Quarters by John Wardle Architects took out the nation's most prestigious prize for house design for what appears, at first glance, to be a reasonably simple building.

The Shearer's Quarters is located on a historic farming property on North Bruny Island on land first granted to Captain James Kelly in 1840. The 440ha property has been owned by the Wardle family for the past 10 years and is still a working sheep farm with about 3000 sheep. The main purpose of the new building is to accommodate up to eight shearers during the shearing season as well as family and friends and staff members of the architectural practice on annual tree planting weekends (7000 trees have been planted from seed stock in the past decade).

The new 136sqm quarters is built on the site of the original shearing shed, which was destroyed by fire in the 1980s, and utilises a limited palette of materials that is in keeping with traditional shearing sheds and enables the new building to sit nicely as a companion building to the existing historic cottage constructed by Kelly.

Corrugated galvanised steel has been used on the exterior of the building and timber on the interior (the chimney is made from old, handmade clay bricks). The simple use of materials was one of the aspects of the building's design that grabbed the attention of the jury.

There was an apple orchard nearby up until the 1960s and, according to John Wardle, old timber apple boxes are in plentiful supply in this part of the world. The interior of the building is entirely lined in timber - primarily pine sourced from different suppliers as individual trees from old rural windbreaks - however, the bedrooms have been lined in recycled apple crates sourced from the many orchards of the Huon Valley.

The beauty of the Shearer's Quarters is how it relates to the other buildings on the site such as the old farmhouse. The roof line transforms from a flat, or skillion roof, on the western end of the building into a traditional gabled roof at the far end to the east, which is in architectural dialogue with the existing colonial farmhouse. The morphing roof line echoes a floor plan that widens to accommodate the communal area of the building and to take in views of the sea.

According to the jury's citation for the Shearer's Quarters, this is a building that "appears as a very simple form; an agricultural shed in the landscape. A detached brick chimney forms a dialogue with those of the adjoining 1840s dwelling. The resolution of detail is extremely sophisticated. The placement of apertures, which provide dramatic views and a sense of place, and the plan layout as a whole, are composed so that the Shearer's Quarters harmonises completely with its rural setting." The win by John Wardle Architects for this modest building is testament to the fact that a house doesn't need to be a multi-million-dollar mansion to grab the attention of the judges and that a smaller scale house built on a tight budget can be as architecturally innovative as one with everything that opens and shuts.

As well as the Robin Boyd Award, this year's jury also gave a national award for a single house to the Cliff Face House by Fergus Scott Architects with Peter Stutchbury Architecture. On one hand, the Cliff Face House is modest - it's been said it resembles scaffolding - but its location and the problems associated with it are what make this dwelling an architectural statement. The site of the house presented problems from the beginning.

It's bounded by a massive 6m-high sandstone cliff and the road to the east, and it runs steeply downhill to the shoreline to the west. Rather than fight against the landscape, Scott and Stutchbury embraced it. The jury praised the Cliff Face House for making a virtue of the difficult site it sits on and for the restrained palette of materials used in its construction as a way of engaging the building's inhabitants with the richness of the site.

"House and landscape are assimilated such that the rock face becomes the wall of several rooms," says the jury's citation. "The structure is reminiscent of temporary scaffolds once placed against large sandstone buildings, but here the roles are reversed - the building provides a scaffold for the rock face."

The house is one room wide and split over three levels, sitting centrally on the site and running parallel to the water. As the house descends down the slope it uses the sandstone cliff on the lower two levels as a living wall, complete with moss and hanging ferns in the bathroom. Scott has described the house as being like an oyster, whereby the exterior of the house is a "tough" shell designed to protect the occupants inside what is an environmentally designed home. The cliff face is integral to the natural cooling system for the house in summer and, as the house faces west, it's kept naturally warm in winter. Making use of the natural cliff face in such a way would no doubt bring a great deal of uncertainty to the construction process. The fact that Scott and Stutchbury have pulled it off is evidence of not only their skill and the skill of their builders, but also the bravery of the client.

This was a good year for houses. As well as the Robin Boyd Award and one national award in the residential (houses) category, the jury also awarded four commendations in the category to projects scattered right around the country. They went to Robert Simeoni Architects for the Queensberry Street House in Victoria; Owens and Vokes for Four-Room Cottage in Queensland; Kerstin Thompson Architects for House at Big Hill in Victoria; and Sam Crawford Architects for the Smee Schoff House in NSW.

Jury member and AIA gold medallist Richard Johnson of Johnson Pilton Walker told WISH that this year's awards contained "some really impressive pieces of architecture." And in saying that he was praising the clients as well as the architects. "It's drive, their energy, that creates the climate that architects work in. It demands more of architects."