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OR VIEW ALL PROJECTSOR GO BACK TO SEARCH RESULTSOR VIEW ALLPROJECTS BY ARCHITECT DONOVAN HILLSHOWROOM PROJECTS2003 PROJECTSPROJECTS IN SYDNEYPROJECTS PHOTOGRAPHED BY TIM LINKINS |
A Donovan Hill design is an invitation. An invitation to an event, both in the literal sense and in a more philosophical sense.
The internationally recognised practice credited with designing one of the great houses of the 20th century (the C House) is well known for focusing its forces on where and how memorable events will take place within a scheme
Tibet, a gallery for contemporary Tibetan rugs, with a residence above, In
Sydney's Queens Street, Woollahra, is no exception, The designers and owners, Diki Ongmo and Tim Linkins, were happy to use space for sleeping and bathing sparingly within the scheme so as to enhance the living, dining and exhibition areas where personal and professional events might unfold.
But here an event is not simply something that takes place between certain hours, in a certain location. It is that which occurs while nothing and/or something else Is happening. It's what happens meanwhile, In the Deleuzian sense, If you will. A superimposition, one upon the other, rather than time as a linear succession. It is this notion of .event' that informs Timothy Hill's concept of space and how he and Brian Donovan engage with time.
"We look for the authenticating act of an event rather than something purely aesthetic, and rather than simple matching geometrIes," he says. "We are not interested in the distant resolution,
"Ours is an alternative idea of how to participate in history. There's a hybridisation between figure and ground, We see history as continuous. A commitment to the archaic carries authenticity it it is made to evoke something contemporarily important,"
This matches Ongmo's professional concerns in her own undertakings, in that the most contemporary and graphic textile designs in the rugs at Tibet are in fact those taken from the most ancient and traditional of Tibetan designs. She and Linkins, who is also an architectural photographer, have established a manufacturing facility in Kathmandu and oversee all elements of production, sometimes using designs dating from the
11th century,
The match between Tibet and Donovan Hill is also one that suits the nature and behaviour of Tibet's clientele. "There's no shop window to look through, so there is an Implicit invitation to come inside and see," says Linkins. "People have to enter through this one porthole," he adds, referring to Tibet's distinctive red door and brassframed timber aedicule that forms the ritualised entrance to the building,
es like a haven from the street, the noise and the exposure, One is drawn into a process of discovery Inside. It doesn't feel like a shop, it feels more domestic. People respond to the hospitality of the design."
It is this hospitality that has evoked a design which is "large, light, layered and sensuous" -the list of requirements presented by Linkins to Hill.
Unlike most current approaches to renovating terraces, Donovan Hill didn't simply slice the back off the house, install celling-to-floor glass on the back wall, gut each storey and create a white box with a Victorian facade. "I didn't want a minimalist Sydney terrace," says Linkins. "I wanted something more experimental, across the Melbourne/Brisbane axis."
The Tibet design can only be called dividual,The space divides and divides again. Hill says, "Even within the context of atiny terrace in Sydney we treated what was before us as a landscape, rather than a set of rooms.The terrain is such that you enter through the f rent door, the only access point to the building, and negotiate a number of planes and rises both at ground level and as you rise the stairs. The end point of all the folding and moving through the space is the nest, in the living area, From this vantage point you can see all the key elements of the design: the loft above the pond below, the balcony behind and the padded, textured dining and kitchen space in front."
Soft, sound -absorbent, pigmented cork/rubber flooring acts as a light renector to create the luminosity in the space. "The terrace becomes a lantern in itself," says Hill,
The designers inverted the usual formula of timber flooring and white walls -they have all the timber battens above the floor. Instead of having one even flow of floor they have fragmented all the floor levels. Height is created and exaggerated not only by stretching doorways from ceiling to floor, but by also making the doorways narrower.
Donovan Hill works largely on big commercial and public buildings, "I was pleased we were able to generate a comparison of scale In that small I space," says Hill. "In fact we did much better than I expected. The vantage point of the nest for instance is spatially small, but volumetrically generous,"
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