 | BURST*003 A prototype by SYSTEMarchitects, with Robin Edmiston and Associates, Burst*003 uses new technologies to reinvigorate the prefabricated house, while also recalling the joy of the beach shack.
REVIEW Sandra Kaji O’Grady
PHOTOGRAPHY Floto+Warner studio
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The front elevation of
the prefabricated house,
with its laser-cut plywood
facade.
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Detail of the
diagonal web of structure
underneath the house.
Holes have been cut into
the joists for storing
surfboards and wetsuits.
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The windowless front
facade is detailed with a
large flower motif taken
from bikini designs.
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The open rear
elevation, with a set of
bleachers reaching down
into the backyard.
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The folded
planes of a bedroom
interior.
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Facade
detail with undercroft
structure.
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Undercroft
structure.
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A surfboard
stored under the
house within a joist.
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Looking up the
entrance stair.
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The
top of the stair and
dining area seen from
the dining deck.
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The highly
faceted planes of the
living area.
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In my attempts to assemble criteria for evaluating
architecture, both as a critic and as a teacher, I often
return to Sol Lewitt’s “Sentences on Conceptual Art” (1968). Sentence 32 states: “Banal ideas cannot be
rescued by beautiful execution.” Sentence 34
proposes: “When an artist learns his craft too well
he makes slick art.”1 With the craft of making
buildings in the hands of others, beautiful execution
is so improbable that it has for many architects –
and also those who judge their work, be they clients,
critics or other architects – become the highest
ambition and measure of success. I am not
advocating sloppiness or some sort of architectural
equivalent of Art Povera, but am unsatisfied by
extraordinary displays of control over details and
joints in projects that remain conceptually banal.
While the refined architectural project may
contribute a great deal to the lives of its immediate
clients and physical locale, projects that make a
broader cultural contribution are also necessary.
Buildings that make us wonder and see the world
anew are too rare. So too are projects that alter our
assumptions about the limits of the discipline and
demonstrate alternatives to conventional solutions.
In this context the Parish house, or Burst*003, is
refreshingly ambitious.
Situated in North Haven on the north coast of
New South Wales, the house is the work of the
New York-based partnership of SYSTEMarchitects
– Jeremy Edmiston and Douglas Gauthier – in
collaboration with Robin Edmiston and Associates.
It is the first realization or prototype of a prefabricated,
affordable housing system that they plan to launch
in the American market as “Burst”. Mass-produced
housing from prefabricated components is an old
ambition. The history of architecture is replete with
prototypes thwarted by contextual forces outside the
architect’s control – for example, Suuronen’s plastic
Futuro house of the 1970s, a victim of the fuel crisis.
To embark again on this path takes a stubborn
optimism and a willingness to embrace a range of
issues more akin to industrial design – including
marketing and competition, packaging and delivery,
as well as questions of variation and consistency in
the product range.
The prototype house is achieved most elegantly
here using pieces of laser-cut plywood brought to
site on a single flat-bed truck. What is
groundbreaking is that the aspiration for prototyping
has been coupled with a formal complexity and
potential for customization supported by new
computer-supported design and manufacturing
tools. The duo has been working for a decade now
on the potentials for interlocking structures of
smaller planar parts. Communicating the fabrication
and assembly of 1,100 non-identical pieces required
atypical forms of documentation, and with that, an
original approach to thinking through how to design
and realize that design. Laying out the plywood
pieces was achieved using the software program
used in garment manufacture with very little
wastage. While high technology is used throughout
the design and manufacturing process, low
technology is intentionally employed for assembly
and for maintenance. Assembly requires fewer skills
but intense cooperation and concentration. The
building was put together by architecture students
in something akin to a barn raising. The architects
are fond of this image, yet recognize that the design’s
reliance on numbers of enthusiastic and sympathetic
cheap labourers will make it less desirable for some.
Accordingly they are working on a solution that
packs flat and unfolds.
The project’s technological innovations are only
half the story. Socially and formally, it recalls a type
of weekender near extinction in Australia – the fibro
shack on stilts whose rudimentary amenities
demand that its occupants forgo the cosseted habits
of their lives in the city. For most of the twentieth
century the Australian beach shack and its
counterpart in New Zealand, the bach, facilitated
days spent outdoors unconcerned by tidiness,
propriety or the display of social or economic status.
Summer holidays functioned like carnivals in
medieval Europe – a pair of speedos (delightfully
referred to in Sydney as budgie smugglers) and
bedrooms furnished with mismatching bunk beds
being a great leveller. In New Zealand, the active
mythologizing of the bach – among architects as
well as in popular culture – has gone some way to
preserve the idea that retreat from the constraints
and stresses of the city is furthered by the simplicity
of one’s shelter. This seems lost in Australia, where
beach houses have become luxurious anticipations
of “sea change” and comfortable retirement. The
Parish house reinvents the beach shack for a family
with three young children in a church community
where gatherings can be large and informal. In
materiality and expression it conveys the joy of
beach life and operates as an armature for life
devoted entirely to recreation – even its small living
space has been given over to table tennis. The rear
facade of the house overlooks a garden with the
proportions of a basketball court and reaches down
to it with a set of bleachers perfect for games and
impromptu family theatre. The potential for play
continues in the space underneath the house, where
the diagonal web of structure imbues a gothic,
otherworldly quality. Cut into the joists are holes for
storing surfboards and wetsuits and it is easy to
imagine this undercroft gathering bicycles, dogs and
teenagers during the holidays.
The Parish house sits on an unprepossessing flat
allotment without views in a cul-de-sac of brick
veneer suburban project homes. It was the first and
only house in the street to meet new flood
requirements for buildings in the area. Raised above
ground on stilts, it was always going to be
anomalous in the context, and it does not shirk from
this. It greets the neighbours with a windowless,
folded facade lightened by a large flower motif
taken from bikini designs. The faceted facade
suggests only a little of the visual complexity of the
interior. The plan is quite simple – a wing of
bedrooms to the street and living spaces to the rear
garden – but the volume has a continually changing
section, metaphorically modelled on the wave. The
scale of elements varies to achieve densely faceted
planes in the living room ceilings and walls, with
broader folded planes in the bedrooms. Highly
differentiated, almost painterly light qualities are
achieved across the house. The architects talk about
their interest in chiaroscuro, of using a full range of
light and shadow to achieve dramatic contrast. The
potential for this visual complexity to overwhelm is
countered by a single flat cream paint finish used
externally and internally.
The success of Burst as a kit home is not yet
known. Models of innovation and prototyping
developed in management and humanities are not
well understood in architecture. There is not a clear
path for the architects to follow to ensure the
successful transition from prototype to a product
with market share. Design quality is understood in
other arenas of mass production as a value that can
be used in marketing, yet most kit homes compete
solely in terms of cost, adaptability and availability.
There are not brands of designer kit homes
recognized in the market as there are brands of
furniture and homewares. The Burst House may
change that. That it even attempts an alternative to
the narrow choices of luxury, unique weekender or
generic suburban brick and tile cottage is admirable.
In this first implementation of the system, it is a
success. In form, social type and technique its
ambitions are thoroughly integrated and bravely
carried out.
DR SANDRA KAJI-O’GRADY IS ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR
AND HEAD OF ARCHITECTURE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF
TECHNOLOGY, SYDNEY.
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BURST*003 HOUSE, SYDNEY
Architect SYSTEMarchitects
—principal architects
Jeremy Edmiston,
Douglas Gauthier;
project team Sarkis
Arakelyan, Amber Lynn
Bard, Ayat Fadaifard,
Sara Goldsmith, Henry
Grosman, Kobi Jakov,
Joseph Jelinek, Ginny
Hyo-jin Kang, Gen Kato,
Yarek Karawczyk,
Ioanna Karagiannakou,
Tony Su. Consulting
engineer Buro Happold.
Project engineer
Cristobal Correa.
Client Andrew Katay,
Catriona Grant.
LOCAL CONSULTANTS
Site architect
Robin Edmiston and
Associates. Site
engineer Peter Marcus.
Site architect for
SYSTEMarchitects
Chris Knapp.
CONSTRUCTION
Laser cutting
Grifco International Inc.
Frame assembly team
Sarkis Arakelyan,
Newcastle University
architecture students:
David Arnott, Andrew
Cavill, Justice Chengeta,
Louisa Gee, Ned
Haughton, Simon
Hayward, John Jones,
Jonathon Mentink,
Shaun Purcell, Jo
Redden, Justin Spraull,
Ksenia Totoeva.
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