THE BLUNT HOUSE
KATE BAILEY
JASON KI HYUN PARK Location KOONYA Photographer DAN PRESTON
Triptych comprises 3 major works in one location. The Main House, or Blunt House, The Pulmonum, and The Glass House. Each work responds to its specific location and its relationship to the whole architectural choreography.
At the Main House Room 11’s intuitive response to place was to look towards the expanse of Norfolk Bay.
Once this desire had been established, the design was driven to achieve this goal. The service spaces became delightful idiosyncratic, light-hearted juxtaposition to this stern and sincere Architectural gesture. The experience of entering is to be buried and then projected into the landscape.
The Pulmonum is the second gesture, and fulfils the clients desire for a destination within a vast continuum of landscape. A place to rest the eyes when the astonishing beauty of the greater view is too much to comprehend. The experience of the Pulmonum upon approach appears to be one of simple, formal definition, but upon entering, the sky above is reflected in the pool below. You are brought back to your body.
The Glass House is the third piece of the Triptych. A retreat for short term, elated occupancy. A reprieve. Lighting fire, cutting bread, and eating fresh food become ceremony.
This project illustrates that Architects and the Architectural processes can liberate individuals experience of residences beyond mundane outcomes. Architecture that shows joy,
masterly control, and represents ideological freedom, we believe is of intrinsic value.
The client sees these buildings as an extraordinary manifestation of his desires that transcends his original brief.
TASMANIAN ARCHITECTURE AWARD FOR RESIDENTIAL ARCHITECTURE – HOUSES (NEW)
Jury Citation
“Monumental, heroic and intimate. These three singular, site-specific works heighten and intensify the relationship between occupants and landscape, and establish an almost sacred processional approach between a series of elements and the wider landscape.
The glass pavilion, while seemingly a trope of Modernism, is in fact a highly attenuated essay on room-making in the Tasmanian landscape. The walls of the interior are the trees and bushland. The everyday acts of sleeping, eating, and being are in communion with the shrouding light of these specific forests. The extruded form of the central house sits on an engineered thread of experiential tension with the horizon. The sectional entry sequence and pattern of light and shadow elongates the experiential threshold. Immersed in the belly of the earth, the enfilade progressively culminates in a projected experience over the expanse of the valley. Rituals of bathing and sleeping are always inventive, and always experientially considered.
A focus object in this sequence is the encounter with a concrete void. This chamber was conceived as a finite focal point that yields views into the infinite skies above. In the classical tradition of harnessing elements of a broader landscape, this architectural triptych offers a considered proposition to Tasmanian space-making.”
https://www.architecture.com.au/awards/2023-awards/2023-tasmanian-architecture-awards-winners
SHORTLISTED FOR NATIONAL ARCHITECTURE AWARDS 2023
PUBLICATION
Featured in The Local Project Issue 12 + Online Publication
https://thelocalproject.com.au/videos/koonya-by-room11-issue-12-feature-the-local-project/
Wallpaper (Online Publication)
https://www.wallpaper.com/architecture/koonya-triptych-tasmania-house-room-eleven-australia
