Melbourne Festival: University of Melbourne unveils Walter Burley Griffin Ivanhoe house replica

Unless you know the owners or are part of a special access interest group, you will never experience one of Australia’s most fascinating houses in its original form.

But as part of Melbourne University’s contribution to this year’s Melbourne Festival, from Friday until October 23 you will be able to walk into a full-sized replica of Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahoney Griffin’s intriguing little Ivanhoe house Pholiota.

In 1920, when domiciled in Melbourne as part of Burley Griffin’s seven year appointment as Design Director of the capitol building exercise of Canberra, the American architect couple built themselves a tiny home that Melbourne University faculty of architecture professor and historian Philip Goad likens to “a concrete tent”.

Square and squat, with a pyramid roof and walls of 6.4 metres in length that are divided into alcoves for beds, kitchen, bathroom, wardrobe, piano bay and fireplace, the “mushroom house” was essentially a one-room experiment in the use of a concrete block building system Griffin had developed, called Knitlock.

Goad says the couple actually made the blocks at Ivanhoe, which makes it “the classic DIY project”.

It seems fitting that because they couldn’t actually get a building permit for such a diminutive structure on the posh Glenard Estate subdivision, that Griffin also planned, they described it on the plan as “a doll’s house”.

But the pair lived in it in perfect bliss for two years. In fact, Mahoney was so enamoured of “the cheapest, most perfect and charming home in the Empire” that each morning on leaving for work, she would walk backwards to prolong her visual pleasure.

Though still in situ, Pholiota has been subsumed as a back room in a private house.

But to Goad, and anyone who has stood within it, it is perfect. “Unforgettable”, he says, “I could live in it”.

The university’s contribution to this year’s Melbourne Festival is a consideration of three of early Melbourne’s cultural influencers, the Burley Griffins, and the eccentric musician Percy Grainger, in campus-wide multi-faceted exhibition “Cultural Collisions”, curated by long-time Edinburgh Festival director, Sir Jonathan Mills.

The Burley Griffin exhibit in the basement Dulux Theatre of the new Melbourne School of Design has many components, but the centrepiece is the replica of Pholiota made and assembled from 2300 fit-together building blocks in under a month by masters architecture students and industrial designer Alex Goad.

Unless collected by a museum for indoor display, Pholiota 2 “is an ephemeral thing”, Phillip Goad says.

However, as a here and now teaching tool and at 43 square metres “which is about the scale of a modern studio apartment”, the Professor feels “it has a certain modesty but an enormous potential for making minimal living valid.

“It becomes an exemplar for thinking about efficient, minimal planning in a Melbourne that does need to consolidate.”