Sean Godsell: Houses
Sean Godsell: Houses
Sean Godsell
Thames & Hudson, December 2019
Hardcover | 12-1/4 x 10-1/2 inches | 252 pages | 284 illustrations | English | ISBN: 978-0500343524 | $85.00
PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION:
As many architects turn to Australia for inspiration, Sean Godsell—a pioneer of Australian minimalism—has established himself as an important influencer on the global architecture scene. This survey of his residential architecture features twelve house projects across Australia, each illustrated with full-color photography, as well as a selection of the architect’s hand-drawn plans and exploratory sketches, which illuminate how each project relates to its surrounding landscape.
Featuring an essay by Godsell about the influences of Australia’s landscape and culture in his work, this survey also includes an introduction by leading critic and commentator Philip Goad about the achievements of Godsell’s career to date and the importance of his visionary designs. With a complete illustrated chronology of Sean Godsell’s works, this overview will be an important resource for architecture lovers and design enthusiasts.
Sean Godsell is an award-winning Australian architect based in Melbourne who has lectured around the world. Previously listed as one of Wallpaper*‘s ten people destined to “change the way we live,” he has also been featured in Time magazine’s “Who’s Who: The New Contemporaries.”
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dDAB COMMENTARY:
Although I've never been to Australia, I have been fortunate enough to see one of architect Sean Godsell's buildings in person. The Australian architect was one of ten international architects selected by Francesco Dal Co and Micol Forti to participate in the first Holy See pavilion, which took place at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale and consisted of full-sized chapels placed on a wooded corner of the island of San Giorgio Maggiore. Godsell's chapel was a tall rectilinear volume with operable awnings at the base of each side. The height accentuated the golden glow that came from an opening at the top, while the awnings revealed the altar when open but sealed off the whole when closed, as if to protect it from its surroundings. The latter made it seem like a building built for the harsh environment of the Australian bush was transplanted to a small Venetian island. Perhaps the prefab building will be relocated, as they were intended to be, to such a site, making the design of the "siteless" building more logical relative to its context.
Since learning about Godsell's Future Shack a couple decades ago, I've been a fan of his architecture, which tends to be formally restricted to rectilinear volumes and the use of operable planes, awnings, screens, and other devices for protecting the buildings and enabling flexibility. The chapel can be seen as an application of the formal ideas of Future Shack — a shipping container with a front panel awning, a large parasol roof, and a wood-lined interior — to a different program. The two projects express how the formal limitations Godsell appears to give himself in no way limit his inventiveness nor the appropriateness of the solutions. The nine houses in Sean Godsell: Houses express more of that inventiveness, as does the inclusion of Future Shack and two pieces of street furniture (Park Bench House and Bus Shelter House), which also capture his onetime consideration of populations otherwise forgotten by architects.
It's hard to single out one of the nine houses as a favorite, particularly since Godsell incorporates timber slats, one of my favorite material applications (Slat Happy is a Tumblr blog I run but haven't updated in close to a year), into many of them. These slats, or in some cases metal grating, serve to shade the simple rectilinear volumes and provide protective wrappers for the houses and their inhabitants. Philip Goad, in his excellent introductory essay, describes these "second skins" as "carapaces," what in Godsell's hands are "climate-responsive veil[s] of extreme visual delicacy." The most intriguing of these is the most recent, the House in the Hills (completed the same year as the chapel), where an L-shaped house sits beneath a 100-foot-square operable louvered parasol that also covers the adjacent courtyard. By shifting the screen that normally wraps one of his houses to a separate plane lifted above it, the design is a bit of departure for Godsell, but it is still clearly his own: it fits neatly alongside the eight other houses.
Beginning with the Kew House from 1997 and culminating with the House in the Hills, the nine houses in this beautifully produced book trace the concise refinement of Godsell's residential architecture over two decades. The architect's descriptions, sketches, and hand drawings (like fellow countryman Glenn Murcutt, Godsell is not a fan of computer drafting) are presented on smaller lightweight pages inserted between the many pages of glossy color photographs. These pages add visual interest to the book but more importantly are integral to expressing the particularities of each house and the personal nature of Godsell's designs. The House in the Hills, for instance, was inspired by "simple steel-framed haysheds, roofed but open on all sides," as described by Godsell in words and images. Bookending the nine houses and three socially minded shelters are matte gray pages with essays by Goad and Godsell at the front, and floor plans and project credits at the back. At $85 Sean Godsell: Houses isn't cheap, but fans of Godsell will not be disappointed with the care and craft of a book that is a perfect parallel to the care and craft of his architecture.
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