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RADAR
FEATURES
COMMENT
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| | RADARDELIGHT Science and place, technology and making. Philip Goad reports on Roy Grounds’s bush laboratory.
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Looking up into the Barn roof structure.
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Detail of the Barn’s roll-down sailcloth blind.
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Roy and Betty Grounds’s Barn at Penders.
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The adjacent dome with “Tomlin” garbage tin lids as connectors.
Photos Philip Goad.
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In November 1985, in the the pages of Architecture Australia, Jennifer Taylor admitted Roy and Betty Grounds’s Barn at Penders into the pantheon of Australia’s finest buildings. Today this unusual little structure still has the power to enthrall.
Located at Bithry Inlet on the southern NSW coast, the Barn was Grounds’s “bolthole” for 15 years, his holiday escape whilst designing the National Gallery of Victoria and the Victorian Arts Centre.
The site and its structures are now part of Mimosa Rocks National Park, itself a monument to the vision of Grounds and his friend, Melbourne businessman Kenneth Myer. In 1981, they gave their 220 hectare property to the nation, conserving a remarkable piece of coastline as a national park.
As originally built in 1965, the Barn was a large tepee of spotted gum poles, with a tapering roof-vault lined horizontally with Tanalith-treated saplings that had been carefully graded in decreasing size from bottom to top. On the roof were sods of kykuyu grass complete with a sprinkler system. In spring, the roof was completely covered in yellow daisies. However, the roof’s weight soon threatened to crush the supporting structure. Its rustic charm was replaced by a roof of bright yellow semi-translucent corrugated fibreglass. Grounds loved the startling transformation – the Barn now stood out like a bright yellow beacon. The original roll-down nylon sailcloth blinds, also yellow, hung vertically from the roof’s lower edge. Inside, the effect was of permanent sunshine. Light,
the seasons, cross ventilation to deter sandflies, and the effects of the sun could all be controlled by simply raising and lowering the blinds.
Soon after completing the Barn, Grounds constructed a geodesic dome next to it. It was a greenhouse for Betty’s paw-paw and a workshop where Grounds could tinker with experimental gadgets and indulge his interests in timber and rock sculptures.
Circular wood blocks were used as the dome’s connecting hubs and, to complete each hub, Grounds added, in typically idiosyncratic style, a galvanised steel “Tomlin” garbage tin lid. The result was a tour de force of resourcefulness and making do – in absolute opposition to the hyper-technological solutions being developed internationally to waterproof,
seal and connect the much larger geodesic domes designed by Buckminster Fuller.
At Penders, Grounds moved beyond Fuller’s technocratic future of a universal architecture of everyplace for everyman. He built a primitive hut and a geodesic dome in celebration of the individual – his equivalent to Thoreau’s hut at Walden Pond. As Marr Grounds described his father’s Barn, “It’s a house, it’s a tent, it’s a temple.” Both structures can be read as products of a laboratory, a form of private model making out in the bush far from prying eyes. They demonstrate an interest in science, but within the limits of everyday building and phenomenological placemaking. The test of science was that it be tested as architecture. Instead of being dropped in by a helicopter, it was made by hand. This was learning by doing.
Grounds attempted to build his postwar critique of science. He did not reject science; rather his work was directed at grappling with science and locating it in specific contexts, be they constraints of material, place or function. Grounds’s structures at Penders epitomise Ignasi de Sola-Morale’s claim that such widely diverging interests as science and myth could become a clearing ground in the 1950s, the basis for “the pursuit, in short,
of a degree zero for architecture”.
Dr Philip Goad is an associate professor at the University of Melbourne. A conservation management plan of Penders, coordinated by Oona Nicolson, with a team including Philip Goad, Bryce Raworth and David Beauchamp, has been completed for the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service
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Copyright © 2010 Architecture Media Pty Ltd
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