Exemplar House:
Mornington Peninsular Victoria Australia
Peninsular House 2002
Sean Godsell Architects.
Located in the Mornington Peninsular of Victoria Australia a 30 metre x 72 metre oxidised steel portal structure has been embedded into the side of a sand dune. At an external glance the house wears the uniform of a minimalist box, refined further with vertical timber panels that sit next to eachother, spaced apart at an equal distance. Godsells has created an external facade which acts like a skin of the building, carefully arranging materials to filter the environment in unique ways depending upon the room of the house. Each rooms function becomes distinct through the way Godsell has calculated how much light is able to filter into each space. For example 'the living room is very light, the bedroom is moderately light and the library is dark by comparison' (Ume 18). The architects use of timber screens against glass, allow vast amounts of light to billow in the living room through summer, and towards the end of the day, casts gentle rectangular shadows which fade out onto the wooden floor. Every material Godsell has arranged within the home has been specifically done to work to exploit the surrounding environments capabilities. The Jarrah screens can open out in areas for maximum natural ventilation, Glass allows a feeling of transparency, immersing the dweller within the context of the site and walls protect and nurture in appropriate areas like the bedroom. Here Godsell brings environment and form and function together to interplay and work homogeneously within the Peninsular house, maximising the experience an individual can have within the site of a dune. Furthermore Godsell has wedged the house into the sand which makes it appear like an embanked found object. This, coupled with the pure use of wooden panels heighten its homogeneity to its location, blending, capturing and filtering its surrounds. After all the houses name is defined by its location and Godsell has truly succeeded in capturing and filtering essence of the Mornington Peninsular within this home creating 'climatically responsive architecture' (Ume).
Spacially the house is programmed quite simply, categorised into three different areas; a living eating room, library and sleeping room. Godsell has interrogated the spacial arrangements seen within traditional Japanese domestic architecture and recontextualised them within an expereience of an Australian home. 'The sleeping room is an inner room "moya" which has an encolsed verandah "hisashi"' (Ume 18). Here Godsell contains human activities within the home in a arrangement that is appropriated, which makes a cross cultural reference, merging Japanese traditions within Australian architecture. Furthermore Godsell created a link between the traditional Australian sunroom and the enclosed verandah of the Japanese house, sensitively representing a commonality between these two reasonably disparate cultures.
The experience of this architecture is deceiving, as it appears externally simplistic in its reductive use of form and materials, there has been a highly sophisticated attention to detailing, rigorously exploiting the potential of investigating the way materials can be climatically responsive, capturing and filtering the context, recreating an essence of the location. Godsell has created a unique synthesis with Japanese and Australian architecture traditions representing them within a contemporary minimalist aesthetic uniform. Just as minimalist artists aimed to reduce form down to shift heighten the viewers awareness of the experience of viewing, shifting away the focus from the object itself, Godsells reduction of form and attention to detail creates a delightful experience for the dweller, as a home not only to look at but to live in.
