Exposing the inside: architects working with the structures of buildings

Unless purposed for rural, factories or warehouses or in the heritage-heavy wooden house realm of Brisbane’s Queenslanders, the structure of buildings was rarely meant to be seen.

Not so these days. Some award-winning and architect’s own homes are revelling in the reveal of the very stuff of the build, with the joists, beams, herringbone struts and noggins of the construction process on show as if they were the most expensive materiality of the place.

Blatantly displaying these inner or exoskeletons can produce some intriguing effects.

Model of the Waterloo apartments from Chenchow Little; image by Ales Javurek

Just now under construction, Sydney’s Chenchow Little last year won the City of Sydney Design Excellence Award (multiple residential) for its concept for an eight level apartment building in inner eastern Waterloo that overlooks Dyuralya Park.

No strangers to working with the idea of expressed structure, because as Tony Chenchow says, they are a lot more environmentally sustainable “and aesthetically interesting” than the square clad buildings that are rendering so many urban renewal precincts “so generic that you could be in Melbourne, Sydney or Shanghai”, the Waterloo Apartments are a celebration of bending and criss-crossing supporting structure that is quite lovely in its rhythms.

It is not all affect, he explains. The shape of the piece “is very site specific. We studied the historical context of a former wetland site and found that the name of the park is an aboriginal word referring to the Brolga, a wetland bird with stalky legs”.

“Wetlands also usually have buildings on stilts, so we opted to express a stilt-like structure in concrete”.

Humming Puppy yoga studio by Karen Abernethy. Photo: Katherine Lu

Running a relatively new architectural studio with offices in Melbourne and Switzerland, Karen Abernethy has come to fast attention because her exquisite aesthetic values are almost always evident.

In doing over a Redfern, Sydney, industrial space as a yoga studio with the intriguing moniker “Humming Puppy”, Abernethy inflated all the available industrial chic; with roof trusses picked out in black and flaking paint on brickwork and ceiling joists being celebrated by the contrast between the time-tired former and the flash new fittings and fixtures.

In a massive move that exaggerated the beauty of the old timber structure, she installed in the foyer sloping, coloured mirrored glass to make art of the artisan carpentry of another era.

For her efforts, she won the 2016 Interior Design Excellence Award for a workplace under 1000 square metres.

Humming Puppy yoga studio by Karen Abernethy. Photo: Katherine Lu

Immediately inside the front living room of a small and, on the facade of it, raffish-looking historic terrace in Sydney’s Surry Hills you are compelled to look up.

There is a big hole in the ceiling plaster where a semi-circle has been excised to reveal antique floor joists in a house otherwise given a thoroughgoing and original renovation by Breathe Architecture’s Daniel McKenna.

McKenna happened to be on site when builders pulled off the old plaster to reveal the Victorian era structural timbers, “complete with nails and chips”. His on-the-spot decision was to leave them on show. “Why not?”

Double Life house by Breathe Architecture. Photo: Katherine Lu

In making a triple level home for his own family on Highgate Hill, Brisbane, architect James Russell took on a ’60s era wreck on a steep site and when he removed the asbestos covering the walls, discovered horizontal chamfer boards and framing that he thinks is so Queensland typical “and so beautiful”, he decided to leave it naked.

Architect James Russell’s Brisbane house. Photo: Supplied

“The timber on the top two floors was Ironbark and Brushbox,” he tells. “It just needed a couple of weeks of sanding.”  And with so much newly-revealed timber in the place – “that made it look a bit like a barn” – he opted to add in even more in walls linings, storage and open-sided balcony beds for the kids.

The timbered family compound has an arresting, two-level art piece of sexy Sophie by the street artist Sofles at its heart.