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The
Aqueduct and Tent House
The
Aqueduct and Tent House In 2007 Pauline Heslop bought a vacant block of land next to her daughter Lesley and her family, in Northcote. The intention was to build a house for herself, and link her courtyard and new pool with the backyard next door. In designing this house for someone who has spent most of her life running a die-casting factory with her late husband, I wanted to engage with engineering culture. It is hard to imagine a better example of the mind-set of the engineer than the construction of a Roman aqueduct. Their approach seems to have been to connect the water source and destination by a straight line, at a slight descending angle, and not worrying about valleys and hills; they just ploughed right through them! Since the house site is very long and thin, I realised that the form of an aqueduct would fit well on the block, and if skewed to true north, would run from corner to corner. Hollowed out, it would serve as a passage, allowing rooms and external spaces of various sizes to be located alongside it. In the tradition of 'carpenter gothic' architecture, the 'aqueduct' is constructed of wood, but the exposed radially-sawn hardwood weatherboads will turn a stony grey, giving the impression of weight. Thinking
about this weightiness I was reminded of the book The Unbearable Lightness
of Being by Milan Kundera, where two ideas of existence are contrasted:
Is a person's action of no consequence and disappears into oblivion?
Or should we act as if every action repeats heavily for all eternity,
as Neitzche argued? This juxtaposition of lightness and heaviness suggested
an architectural representation. As the aqueduct seemed to stand for
repetition and heaviness, by contrast the rooms of the house could be
in the form of tents - the lightest form of architecture. To refine
the formal language of the house, I visited websites of contemporary
Medieval pageants, and adopted the language style of the striped tents.
As I was not personally convinced by either the heavy or light concept
of existence I have introduced some tile patterns taken from fifteenth-century
icon paintings of the vestments of Russian saints, allowing the inclusion
of systems of thought which include both heaviness and lightness, through
the transformative concept of self-forgiveness. The
Aqueduct and Tent House
The
Aqueduct and Tent House
The
Aqueduct and Tent House
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