Compact House Series

These two houses are the first in a series of compact 'apartment' houses designed by Tom Locke in Waimate North. 

Up north, Tom observed, once people buy a piece of land, they will often chuck up a quick shed or park a caravan on the site, before gradually building up around it.  

The first building the owners put on the site won’t be positioned to face the best view, but the following buildings, a long drop, a workshop, a sleep-out, slowly build towards one location the owners have identified that will frame the ultimate view.

These two Waimate houses use this observation to develop the sites. The houses represent that first placing of the ‘caravan’ on the site, the initial utilitarian building, a minimum requirement to enable the owner to function.

This initial building anchors an outdoor communal setting, a courtyard or garden, that future buildings can congregate around.

Tom proposes this fascination with the view parallels the culmination of the journey of life. One works and struggles through the phases of life, building slowly towards the view. When you get to that point and the activity finishes, you can finally sit back in front of that picture window, watch the change of seasons, contemplate, rest.

The Waimate houses are essentially ‘flash caravans’ with the wheels taken off, a simple and efficient form.

The exterior is inspired by woolsheds - such as the sliding barn door above, which is painted with a motif from Le Corbusier's nunnery at Ronchamp. The interior embodies the spatial economy of apartment living.

Kitchen & dining, the offset windows from within.

Headboard of concrete block and plywood with wardrobe behind. 

Clear corrugated panels over windows create a lantern effect at night.

In the second Waimate house, the 'flash caravan' prototype is modified to accommodate changes in site levels, orientation and materiality.

Clerestories in the bedroom, from the bed one can watch the moon travel from one opening to another.

The Waimate site strategy is a metaphor for a living process, a slow accretion of material and geometric forms, a time-based building process that parallels life's growth and struggle, towards a final framing of the horizon.

Sketches show site development, the shaded area is the 'caravan'. The strategy allows the client time to pause and consider what future building is necessary, these decisions can change when the client is inhabiting the site.

Houses are one bedroom, 90 sq m including garage. 

Anna's Mandala Barbeque

This concrete crop circle enclosing a rotating barbeque is located in a suburban sliver of green named Harry Dansey park, the semi-private backyard of our resident archivist Anna.

The pure geometrical forms revealed in plan suggest a higher destiny for the ubiquitous barbeque, the design invokes the ancient Egyptian symbol of the sun, Aztec zodiacs and ancient Chinese coins.

Architecture and Puppetry

A Conversation with Oliver Smart, Puppeteer

An established puppeteer, Oliver Smart is ever inventive and surprising. I visited Oliver while he was rehearsing for ‘Life Still’, a ‘science fiction in wartime’, which recently premiered in Paris.

Oliver lives in a converted warehouse that is immediately theatrical, a large concreted open area under tall rooflights, with ropes hanging from the ceiling, stage lighting on rigs, black curtains framing the ‘stage’, stairs running up into high loft spaces.

A bedroom constructed in the triangular rooflight opens onto an inclined plane of corrugated iron covered in a growth of mosses, which as Oliver notes is like a forest of kanuka, if you squint. There’s a small timber deck, floor to ceiling fire-glass insulated with bubble wrap - altogether an interesting bricolage of found materials.

As Oliver introduces me to his puppets, he describes his art using a language familiar to architecture, ‘every object has textures which describe the whole object, movement-texture, sound-texture, light-texture’. To my mind these words describe a spatial experience, and the changes in sound and light when moving through the space.

Oliver talks about the parallel between puppeteers and architects. Both ‘orchestrate’ an event – a performance or an architecture, which ‘lives’ or operates independently of the designer. There is an effacement of the presence of the puppeteer / architect once the event begins.

Both choreograph puppets, objects or materials, structures, forms and space, whilst also being controlled by other forces beyond their remit. Both attempt to express an experience beyond the materiality of the object, and use a similar techniques: suspension of belief, illusion, assemblage and detailing, transformation of found object, found materials, found stories, meanings and memory.

Oliver’s puppets start their formation from found objects. The objects arrive with a history, memories, and associations. Over time, Oliver says, their ‘personality’ emerges.

The above photo is of the ‘chicken’, created from down pillows with leather mechanisms and two stick-like legs. Through minimal intervention and precise detailing Oliver plays with the illusion of ‘giving life’ to this inanimate object. The viewer’s mind recognises the movements and shape of the pillow as a chicken, yet without obvious anthropomorphic cues such as eyes or a beak, ‘there is still some pillow in the chicken’.

Oliver creates spatial conditions on stage using the puppets, for example the choreography between the ‘tank’ (above) and ‘moth’. The tank is an assemblage of found objects, a Super 16 film projector mounted on a deckchair on a piano trolley. It projects a rectangle of white light that attracts a ‘moth’, made from an old umbrella.

An ever-changing, flickering space is created on stage as the tank follows the moth and in turn the moth follows the projected light from the tank.

Another puppet based on Hieronymus Bosch is a piece of fabric and two pegs which unpack from a small set of wooden drawers. The puppet continues to unpack haberdashery objects from the drawers onto his workspace on top of the cabinet. He assembles a church, which gets destroyed, a city scape, which also gets destroyed by a Victorian plant waterer slowly squirting feathers. Oliver plays with the quality of the objects and their function, ‘You can’t be violent with feathers, they absorb all violence’.

Oliver describes puppets as having a complete connection to the puppeteer. The action to move the puppet becomes automatic and the puppet an extension of the puppeteers mind. This description reminds me of the system created between a person drawing and the drawing, how one can become immersed in a drawing so that progression into the drawing is like moving through ones mind, controlling the drawing yet allowing the process to be led by the drawing. The drawing emerges like the puppets are slowly infused with life and their qualities emerge.

As a collection, or collective, the puppets have a museum-like quality, found objects with a history and memory. In the curative hands of the puppeteer a new narrative emerges.

The puppeteer sets up a magical alter-reality, and as the audience starts to believe in this strange emergence of life, as all the ‘dead things’ are finding their identity, the puppeteer’s ego dissolves.

I find it inspiring to consider architecture through the puppeteers language, an architecture that can suspend belief. Transformation of space is alchemical, everyday objects transformed in unexpected ways into strange and beautiful scenes. Architecture of magic realism, where we start to believe that the inanimate can become alive, can ‘remember’, and can express ideas about the human condition.

For clips from the Paris show check out:

www.foldedfeather.com

Tank makes itself useful when not working - it also plays Felix the Cat movies.