Winner: Durbach Block Architects

Project Team

Neil Durbach, Camilla Block, David Jaggers, Lisa LeVan, Stefan Heim, Erin Field, Deborah Hodge, Uva Stojanovic

Theme

The Essential House

The grass is greener

Aiming to redress the balance between shrinking home sites and ever-expanding houses, Sydney’s Durbach Block Architects advocate a return to nature and the original ideals of the early 20th century garden suburb, with its wild and endless vegetation.

“I grew up with big gardens, and to me the most successful house is subservient to the garden,” says Neil Durbach. “When I think of the houses I love, there is a beautiful balance between the garden and its rooms. I think that nature is more powerful than any piece of architecture.”

Durbach Block’s Infinity House is a small dwelling nestled into and surrounded by a lush garden. But not the hard furnished outdoor terraces with potted plants of so many new homes, instead he yearns for a” messy mass of vegetation, with cool green carpets as clearings within. The crazier it is, the more beautiful it is.”

Durbach Block hopes that constant immersion in this beauty will have a positive effect on the home’s occupants, leading them into reflection rather than distraction, and to a sense of peace that contrasts sharply with the hurried pace of modern life.

The “figure 8” plan provides endless surfaces for house and garden to meet: at the junction of the two loops, large sliding doors blur the boundaries between inside and out. The unrestrained greenery climbs the walls and spills down from the roof-top terrace, covering 80% of the modest site with landscape, a combination of native, deciduous and edible plants.

“Many contemporary houses have doors that slide open so you can step into the garden, but this house offers an incredibly different emotional experience because you slide back the doors and the garden is the house,” he says.

As well as offering infinite connections to nature, the house can be used in myriad ways, and is equally capable of accommodating a family with children or two separate households.

“For single families, for families with older children, in-laws or home share, the Infinity House can be occupied in many ways,” Durbach explains. “Teenagers, parents, in laws or guests can live slightly separately with large living spaces between. These spaces completely open to each other and to the garden.”

Alternatively, the house can be divided into two units, with both the small (75m2) and large (140m2) dwellings boasting separate entries and private gardens. It could also be divided to provide a small public function or home office.

The connections to the garden are enhanced through the use of brick for structure and enclosure, as floors and vaulted ceilings, and in arches and curving walls. “The soft weighty forms of brick connect to a timeless language of building, because brick has an archaic or primitive quality that makes you feel grounded, cool and calm,” Durbach explains.

While the construction techniques used – brick arches and vaults especially – may require builders to re-learn some lost skills, Durbach says they are not complex forms. “Brick was Australia’s version of stone, so there are some amazing brick buildings around,” he says. “These forms are not difficult to make: we’ve actually incorporated arches like this into some of our houses using huge polystyrene moulds that were reused across the project.”

And while this house is likely to cost more than a conventional project home, Durbach says the cost of construction can’t be measured only in financial terms. “Brick itself is an expensive material because of the labour involved, but it offers huge benefits because it will last for hundreds of years, and you can’t put a price on that,” Durbach asserts. “We see this as a house that’s flexible – over your lifetime and its lifetime. Many of the rooms have unspecified functions so they can endlessly accommodate a huge range of activities, which makes it very long lasting which is really the essence of sustainability”