Shore Thing

Words Jarrod Haberfield
Photography Earl Carter

Simple at first glance, Sean Godsell’s award-winning beach house on Australia’s Mornington Peninsula gradually reveals layer after layer of complexity.

Since forming his eponymous Melbourne practice in 1994, Sean Godsell has devoutly followed one line of architectural research. “What I decided to do,” he begins,“ was deliberately describe a particular architectural context within which to work that wasn’t predominately about form, that was about the destruction of the box.” This pursuit sees his work easily underestimated, and operating with this seemingly straightforward approach is dangerous ground. “If you don’t pull it off,” Godsell offers, “you run a high risk of it just being a dumb box.”

The inherent rigour of his trademark tactic is not missed by his peers however; his latest house on St Andrews beach won this year’s Robin Boyd Award, the Australian Institute of Architect’s gong for the country’s best new house. St Andrew’s Beach, on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, is one of few coastlines in Australia where houses may be built on the dunes. While idyllic during the best summer months, the site reveals its bi-polar nature when on-shore storms and wind chill send winter temperatures below freezing. Fortunately, the clients were inspired by this opportunity to escape their ‘artificial’ city lives, spent always in a world regulated to 22ºC. Their plan was that submersion in nature and her climate would remind them how it felt to be human.

The house – perched on slender legs so that dunes and vegetation remain untouched – takes its role as facilitator seriously. Lifting the box has the perverse implication of exposing it completely to the elements, inciting a particularly tough response. “By elevating it,” Godsell explains, “it had to be robust in its appearance because suddenly, instead of having an intimate conversation with the trees around the building, it was in dialogue with the ocean and the horizon.” The resulting form is a 43m long box, clad in rusted steel grating on each of its long edges, with the short sides left open; a human-scale telescope aimed at the beach view.

Two discrete pavilions are installed within the homogenous steel wrapping, one housing a living space, and the other a ‘barcode’ of bedrooms and baths. Transit between the spaces occurs in the open-air gap between the building’s solid walls and its mesh skin. At each end of the telescope, large decks sit within the folded steel, with full-height glazed doors opening like giant lenses to expose the interiors to the air. At the extremes of each end, Corten steel ‘benches’ provide lateral bracing and protection from the drop below.

Godsell is famous for his buildings’ skins. Essentially a protective device, they filter direct light and diffuse radiant heat, creating an otherworldly interior condition that’s become his signature. Past projects spawned the fine timber battening, which thanks to imitation – that greatest form of flattery – is now seen everywhere. The steel grating that this extreme setting demanded adds another layer of complexity to the skin’s effect. It appears solid from an oblique angle yet is transparent when square-on, the ‘shimmer’ between solid and void establishing a spatial complexity that belies the supposedly straightforward box.

The oscillation between containment and release is accentuated when large vertical panels of skin are manually pivoted in place, allowing winter sun to flood the long, sunward elevation. The benefits of fine-tuning sunlight notwithstanding, the great achievement of these dynamic brise-soleils is the drama of the building’s changability. “Drama in architecture is profound because that’s when it speaks most loudly,” Godsell enthuses. “You can actually provoke an emotional response in the person who’s visiting the building.”

From afar, the building appears as anything but a house. It seems to have landed on the site rather than be floating there. The spaceship metaphor is hard to resist, considering the access stair that hangs from the building’s underbelly to the ground. It could as easily be seen as a rusted relic decaying on the shoreline, or an injured square-edged limb dressed with steel gauze. Its careful placement on a four-legged ‘cradle’ even feels curatorial, like a precious object or artefact is on display. This ‘object-ness’ is enhanced by the operation of the opening wall panels, making an up-scaled toy of the box that is played by the human hand.

Godsell’s practice has also spent years exploring the veranda, both in ideological and physical terms. The veranda is essentially a Colonial device that was tacked onto buildings wherever the British went to protect the architecture they imported from radiant heat. “In the Australian condition it becomes iconic,” Godsell explains. “It has a meaning beyond its use. If you extract it and analyse it, it is full of non-specific spaces and uses. It’s fluid and undefined. It suits the fact that Australians live in a very informal way.” The veranda is abstracted in this house both as a protective mechanism that shields the entire building, and as the in-between spaces that move you from one room or pavilion to another.

Godsell sees the veranda as the site of overlap between the architectures of Australia’s cultural past (Europe) and geographical future (Asia). Chinese and Japanese houses feature veranda elements also, and the inherent fluidity of Asian buildings resonates with the Australian institutions of sunroom, breezeway and sleep-out that each get reworked in this project. The connection Godsell seeks between past and future, Europe and Asia, are more than theoretical fancy. It is the mutual inclusion of these cultural conditions that might bear a genuine Australian architecture to house the future. “That’s our role,” he asserts. “To observe where our society’s headed and to design and construct buildings accordingly.”

With the house at St Andrews, Godsell has added another signpost to mark the course of his significant career. Few architects have the resolve or the courage to treat their work as research. Godsell understands that his role is far greater than providing elite houses for elite clients. His work is a genuine attempt to explore the quandaries of culture, identity and sustainability. “If architects have got one common problem around the world,” he concludes, “it’s the problem of good environmental design.” It’s no wonder he’s the architects’ architect.