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Durbach Block’s installation in the dining room of Elizabeth Bay House, seen from the entry. The glass enclosed garden is designed to conceal a tiny bathroom.
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The beautifully crafted, hybrid piece of furniture defines a number of spaces within the room.
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Freedman Remble’s installation in the drawing room uses found objects to accommodate dining, storage and cooking.
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Sponge-clad forms provide multiple seating arrangements.
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Overview. The installation has a pop art sensibility in its material, colour and wit.
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Student work exploring the same themes also exhibited at Elizabeth Bay House. Photo Maryam Gusheh.
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How might heritage spaces help us to rethink the contemporary world? Maryam Gusheh considers an exhibition at Elizabeth Bay House which explores these ideas through installations by Durbach Block, Freedman Remble and UNSW students.
PHOTOGRAPHY Jody Pachniuk
In 1980, Elizabeth Bay House became one of the first
properties owned by the Historic Houses Trust of New
South Wales. From the outset, the trust’s attitude to
restoration was shaped by a search for the “authentic” – the return of the house to its original state as
occupied by Colonial Secretary Alexander Macleay and
his family between the years 1839 and 1845. This
approach relies on the effect of contrast, or temporal
rupture, between the “present” and a privileged yet
unattainable “past” to which the historic monument is
relegated. In its curatorial approach to Changing
Spaces at Elizabeth Bay House, the Historic Houses
Trust assumes an alternative stance. Here the fabric of
the house is used to recall its recent past and in turn
frames new spatial strategies for contemporary modes
of domestic habitation.
The exhibition brings attention to a lesser-known
history of the house – the 34 years (1941–74) when it
was divided into fifteen self-contained rental flats.
A display charts the social history of this period,
highlighting the building’s capacity to adapt and cater
to evolving social norms and habits. Changing Spaces
is conceptualized against this background. It proposes
the hypothetical return of the “house museum” to
housing, as explored by contemporary design
professionals and students of architecture.
Sydney-based practices Durbach Block and
Freedman Remble were invited to convert the villa’s
front formal quarters into self-contained apartments for
one or two occupants. They were assigned the dining
and drawing rooms, respectively. While granted
conceptual autonomy, both teams worked with an
unusual design constraint – the new work could not
alter or touch the existing wall or ceiling surfaces.
This prescribed distance between the original fabric
and the new framed the schemes as installations,
formally distinct but in dialogue with the
nineteenth-century setting.
Cleared of its furnishings, the dining room offers an
elegant, symmetrically ordered interior. Cedar joinery
elements punctuate and line the smooth walls, adding
tactile richness. They mark thresholds of entry and
exit, frame harbour views and skirt the room’s
perimeter. The fireplace gives an alternative focus,
diverting attention away from the visual spectacle
towards an intimate, interiorized mode of occupation.
Durbach Block read the dining room as the “site” for
their apartment. Their response emerges from an
analysis of the existing space, referencing its revered
qualities while undermining those deemed
inappropriate for a contemporary domestic setting.
They accommodate the new programme through a
hybrid, beautifully crafted furniture piece. The material
palette is restrained. Subtly tinted folding glass panels
enclose a luminous internal bamboo garden and the
tiny bathroom within. Aligned with the front door, this
volume creates a mediated, more private entry into the
apartment and anchors the otherwise floating quality of
the design. A raised timber bed platform returns, splits
and folds into two long benches, making space for
cooking and eating, lounging and reading.
In its proportion and placement the scheme recalls
the dining table, the spatial support for the domestic
rituals that were once enacted in the original interior.
Durbach Block’s contemporary furnishing, however,
pursues an alternative order and is in more direct play
with its envelope. Irregularly composed, it has a casual
sensibility and defines a sequence of spaces in
response to the room’s diverse boundary conditions: a
thickened threshold at the entry, a curved plane
embracing the fire place, and multiple living platforms
oriented towards the – arguably overemphasized –
harbour views. A subtly shifting image, by artist Ross
Harley, activates the room’s only blank wall, offering a
contemporary view and source of light.
Perhaps the most alluring aspect of the project is its
suggestion for a bathing court – a garden element for
the interior. This can be read as a modest homage to the
estate’s original lavish landscape setting, now lost. In
its courtyard typology, however, this green fragment
departs from the picturesque tradition and offers a
more ambiguous relationship between inside and out.
Less concerned with the intricacies of
nineteenth-century formal relations, Freedman
Remble’s conversion of the drawing room focuses on
the recent past – the villa’s bohemian phase. In the late
1920s, prior to the formal subdivision of the house into
flats, a number of artists settled in, rent free, as
squatters. This alternative social structure and the
accompanying informal modes of habitation underpin
Freedman Remble’s response. The conceptual nature of
the project, they argue, presents it as a viable site for an
experimental enquiry into new housing types. In their
narrative, the new apartment is home to two young
couples on modest incomes. Each pair has private
sleeping and bathing facilities, while the living spaces
are shared.
As an empty shell, the drawing room mirrors and
replicates the details of the dining room, but with a
more ornate and dramatic quality – darker wall shades,
drapery and brightly coloured floral carpet. Freedman
Remble’s reconfiguration employs three distinct
furnishing elements. Compact, private modules cater
for bathing and bedding; found objects accommodate
storage, cooking and dining needs; and sponge-clad
amorphic forms support multiple seating arrangements.
In their material choice, colour, expression and wit,
these elements have a pop art sensibility. The insertion
of everyday and mass-produced products, milk crates,
pipes, kitchen sponges and metal trestles into the
classical interior is polemical, presenting a new
material order as a radical critique of the envelope.
The hypothetical reoccupation of the house took on
a more dramatic character when Changing Spaces was
explored in an educational setting. In a one-week
project, fourth-year architecture students from the
Universities of NSW and Barcelona (ETSAB) were asked
to redesign the house for a family, a couple in the
process of getting divorced and their three sons. The
studio was led by Spanish architects Ricardo Flores
and Eva Prats, whose approach to teaching begins with
tales of imagined lives that are related to specific
architectural concerns and spatial relations. They
employ unexpected scenarios – a startle that prompts
critical enquiry. Here, the split of a couple’s marriage is
matched by a radical gesture: slicing the building
through central saloon! The students were required to
retain the front in its existing condition and to erase the
rear for a new form. The woman and man would occupy
the front and the back, respectively, with the children
in between. The brief also called for an enlarged garden,
reclaiming the lost house/garden relationship.
Framed as a critical device, the “cut” has a twofold
purpose. It reveals the drama of the saloon section, a
spatial condition not registered on the building’s facade,
and it presents the house as ruin, the vital component
of an idealized picturesque scene. These two
propositions work in tension. The first represents the
Modernist desire to abstract the past and learn from it
spatially; the second exaggerates the process of decay,
giving the work a pictorial value.
The exhibition at Elizabeth Bay House displays
selected student drawings and models. While the
length of the studio limited the opportunity for
detailed development, the work is conceptually rich,
and is particularly strong in its diversity.
Since the nineteenth century, the institutional
conservation of historic monuments has been
accompanied by a rich theoretical discussion about the
value of heritage fabric to an evolving everyday life. In
this debate, “authentic” restoration and adaptive reuse
represent polarized attitudes. Changing Spaces
occupies a place between, resisting the limits of both
heritage valorization and speculative housing. In
treading a line between the real and the imaginary, it
respects the heritage value of Elizabeth Bay House
while bringing it to contemporary relevance.
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