In collaboration with Vokes and Peters
Words by Stuart Vokes
Photography by Christopher Frederick Jones
Completed in 2024
This exhibition is a celebration of Modern Methods of Manufacturing, the critical role of volumetric modular procurement in housing futures, and a collaboration of creative practice spanning 7 years and 70 projects.
Exhibition 1:1 recalls Marcel Breuer’s Musterhaus (Model House) of 1949 erected in the garden of MoMA in New York, and closer to home, Robin Boyd’s House of Tomorrow presented in that same year for the Modern Home Exhibition in Melbourne, and Harry Seidler’s House of the Future installed at Sydney Town Hall in 1954.
Central to Exhibition 1:1 is a full-scale demonstration house which is ready for transporting to its site many 100’s of kilometres away. To experience a 1:1 scale model of a house within the limits of a larger host building is not only compelling (due to our fascination with the miniature), but also challenges our perception of traditional building and product manufacturing. With the demonstration house isolated as a discreet cultural artefact, the viewer is encouraged to imagine occupancy and the presence of a setting.
SUBURBAN HOUSE
A modest suburban house with a compact floor plan enables agility in the occupation and programming, ageing in place, depth and privacy, and an active engagement with its future neighbourhood. A subtraction at the centre of the plan delivers unexpected and enduring amenity by capturing a piece of the setting, and offering a window to both the sky and the ground, terrain and vegetation. A room that is both empty and full.
Inala, Yagara Country, July 2024