Tunnel House

This project is a house addition of modest budget that adds 60sqm to a small 70s suburban brick bungalow. For a young family, the majority of the new area is an upper-floor addition, with refitting works to the existing building.

The primary gesture is a dark tube or tunnel - a bent extrusion sitting in stark contrast over the (existing) white painted brick house. Thia flat roofed building had a degree of charm and solidity that encouraged its re-use and respect.

The new tube negotiates a very tight site and sensitive planning environment. The project attempts to use such restrictions as a useful design tool. Its sectional offset allows the second floor to be centred on the site maximizing setbacks, while openings are carefully scaled and located to avoid the neighbours. These restrictions set the upper floor addition free from direct formal relationship through with the ground floor.

The tube is distorted and offset - cantilevering over the brick walls and bending most prominently at the front balcony which perches over the entrance. The end of this tunnel forms an enclosed deck facing into the street creating interaction encouraged by town planning policy.

The skin is a flush and matt metallic coated resin material which maintains an abstraction in the form, and which recedes on the skyline. The palette of the exterior is conventional; the interior uses occasional baby blue and orange that casts onto the outside at night. A double cladding system of ply and resin provides good insulation.

For this project, the expression is the built outcome. The motives of the architect are two fold: to satisfy the requirements of the project, and to develop a suburban prototype for the conditions of the project that can be built on in further work. More particularly, the motivation with this type of project is to make a clear architectural gesture that belies the ordinariness of the planning conditions and the tightness of the budgetary conditions to which it is bound. Furthermore, this project, through the process of design (desired negotiation), developed a formal expression (that of a tunnel) which informed subsequent aesthetic and detail decisions.