 | HUGH BUHRICH’S HOUSE IN ONE OF HIS LAST INTERVIEWS, ELIZABETH FARRELLY TALKS TO THE LATE HUGH BUHRICH ABOUT THE LEGENDARY HOUSE HE DESIGNED AND BUILT FOR HIS FAMILY IN THE LATE SIXTIES, SEEN HERE IN NEW PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARTIN VAN DER WAL.
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Hugh Buhrich at home in the house he designed
and built between 1968 and 1972, the “most intensely
personal” of his projects.
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The water edge facade.
The house snuggles into the bush on the northern tip of
Sugarloaf Point, Castlecrag.
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Looking along the bush
facade, with undulating roof and “floating” concrete wall
panel.
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Buhrich describes the house in terms of
its relation to its dramatic waterfront bush site.
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Buhrich describes the house in terms of
its relation to its dramatic waterfront bush site.
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Buhrich describes the house in terms of
its relation to its dramatic waterfront bush site.
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Buhrich describes the house in terms of
its relation to its dramatic waterfront bush site.
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The main living area.
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The floating concrete
panel, with dining table in front.
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Looking down the
length of the house, the living area is to the left and
kitchen to the right.
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The kitchen, with its rising
curving ceiling.
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Concrete detail.
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The wine cellar
hidden beneath a closet.
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Looking along the hall
towards the bedroom.
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The lipstick red fibreglass bathroom.
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The lipstick red fibreglass bathroom.
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Reason and emotion. The sinusoidal ceiling/roof
and hovering concrete panel tucked into the bush.
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AS HUGH BUHRICH tells it, his life has been more found than made, a crooked
chain of accident and happenstance connecting Hamburg, 25 April 1911 to this
sunny Castlecrag cliff edge, 93 years on. Buhrich’s house, described by Peter Myers
as “the finest modern house in Australia”, has something of the same incidental
quality, an extraordinary, almost casual beauty that weighs the synthetic against the
organic, balancing abstract cool with high-cal expressionism, the deliberate with the
chanced upon.
As a teenager Buhrich loved modern design but, being “hung up” on Freud, would
have pursued medicine, not architecture – except that medicine required Latin. As a
Bauhaus fan, he would have enrolled there, except that its non-university status would
have rendered his scholarship invalid; and since the same scholarship required him to
leave home, he enrolled at a “not very good” architecture school in Munich, because of
its proximity to Hamburg. Forcibly ejected by the Nazis in retaliation for student political
activity, Buhrich moved to Berlin, where he worked with Hans Poelzig (“like a really first
class Leslie Wilkinson”) and met Eva, a fellow student whom he would later marry; then
to Zurich, where he studied under the domineering Otto Salvisberg and could barely
afford to eat; finally completing his degree at a “really shocking university” in the
German Free State of Danzig, now Gedansk, where, ironically, he was one of several
students subsidized by the Nazis in order to preserve German cultural dominance.
Eva, fleeing Germany, went to Holland, where Hugh could live but not work, then
to London. There Hugh found a cheap flat in Hampstead but was dismayed also to find
that, despite eight years of school English, it took him twenty-five minutes to ask for
a packet of Players cigarettes. From London, with help from the Quakers, the Jewish
Institute and the RIBA librarian, they might have emigrated to America, only it was too
competitive, or South Africa which, demanding a $200 landing fee, was too expensive.
So Australia became the lucky recipient of Buhrich’s undersung genius.
Even then, the path became only gradually smoother: in 1939 the University of
Sydney’s Professor A. S. Hook helped the new arrivals secure a (shared) architectural
job in Canberra, but when war broke out, the Miss Hall who had vacated the job
returned, and the Buhrichs were sent packing. Eva quickly embarked on a writing and
editing career, later publishing Furniture Trends and Building Ideas for CSR through
the1960s and 70s. But Hugh joined the army, resuming practice only after the war.
Even then, remaining unregistered in New South Wales until the early 1960s, he
restricted himself mainly to furniture and interiors. “Every time I designed a building,” he says, “I would get a ‘please explain’ letter from the registrar ...”
Nevertheless, some twenty-odd of Buhrich’s buildings were built during those
years, most of them houses, many now demolished. His own house, largely self-built
between 1968 and 1972, is comparatively late in the oeuvre; perhaps the most
accomplished of his works, probably the most vivid and “certainly,” agrees Buhrich, “the
most intensely personal”. Described by French critic Françoise Fromonot as “a truly
radical building”, it has become a classic cult object, more celebrated abroad than at
home. After thirty years inhabiting it, Buhrich can think of nothing he would change
“except maybe some light points and switches”. Not bad, as client recommendations go.
Snuggled into its rocky bush setting on Sugarloaf Point’s northerly tip, down the far,
secret end of Edinburgh Road, the house is about as remote as you can get in a global
city. It is a remarkable house on a remarkable site, and much of Buhrich’s narrative is
couched in terms of simple, practical response to the parameters of place and praxis.
On the house’s most distinctive moment, for example, its sinusoidal south-facing
roof-ceiling, the Buhrich version goes like this. Site-response was a given: “the Greeks,” he reflects, “placed their temples on top of hills to stand out, but if you build a house it
has to accommodate the landscape.” Buhrich had always wanted to live by the water,
and wanted his house on one level, facing it, but also a sense of “going downhill” towards – hence the sloping ceiling, up from the legal minimum at the northern edge.
At the same time, the otherwise bush-facing kitchen needed to step up for views over
the living space, but the Act allowed no more than twenty-five per cent of the ceiling
area to drop below eight feet. So it was “just a practical response: I decided to push
the ceiling up between the trusses” – a solution with the added virtue of admitting extra
light. The opposing curve of the copper-clad roof, explains Buhrich with equal simplicity,
arose from a need to accommodate the depth of trusses, spanning as they do the full
eight-metre width of the house. And then there’s the bathroom, that bathroom: a
seamless, detail-less, breathtaking lipstick red, which Buhrich accounts for as a simple
development of three facts – that he’d already built a fibreglass yacht, he’d never liked
fussy bathrooms and he did like occasional strong colours. Simple, really.
But of course there’s more to it than that. Site-response is all very well, and this is
a site of no small presence. But every nuts-and-berries house in town was doing the
same theoretical thing, and not one of them looks like this. It’s not just the roof. There’s
also the curious angularity of the plan, with its casual commingling of the regular and
irregular geometries; the craggy yet sprightly elevations, stamped with great irregular
concrete slabs that float like icebergs on the cliff edge; the rough-hewn sandstone
fireplace wall; the terrifying edges of deck and stair. And the bathroom.
The essence, in many ways, is in the section: snuggled into bush and crag it may
be, but the only point at which house and planet actually interpenetrate is the wine
cellar, a secret cavern hidden beneath a closet. Otherwise, the heavy in situ concrete
structure floats ethereal, as effortless as the “floating” concrete wall panel under the
undulating ceiling, lending to the whole a submarine surreality, a lightness of being that
resonates endlessly with the watery view.
It’s eclectic, but consistent in its eclecticism, each part bringing not just opposing
sine curves but two opposing world views into head-on collision: simple planar
rationalism meets organic neo-expressionism. “Yes, I suppose you could say that,” reflects Buhrich, as though it’s the first time the thought has occurred to him but
advancing no further explanation as to his intellectual sources. Commentators have
suggested influence from the Ronchamp and the Maison de Verre, but the house sits
more easily between two characteristically German streams of the high Modern:
Miesian (quasi-)rationalism and the techno-organic tradition of Scharoun and Behnisch,
with their characteristic amalgam of minimalism and expression; reason, if you like,
and emotion. The site may be absolutely Sydney, and the house may be a wholehearted
response to it, but its guiding spirit, for my money, is a thoroughgoing, international,
surreal-edged, Miroesque abstract expressionism.
ELIZABETH FARRELLY IS A SYDNEY-BASED ARCHITECTURAL CRITIC.
AS THIS ISSUE WENT TO PRESS WE HEARD THE SAD NEWS THAT HUGH BUHRICH HAD PASSED AWAY. ARCHITECTURE AUSTRALIAWILL PUBLISH AN OBITUARY IN THE NEXT ISSUE.
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