Green House / Sean Godsell Architects

Alterations and additions to a small heritage listed timber cottage in inner suburban Melbourne. Planning and heritage requirements and construction costs fundamentally drove the outcome of this project. Our client came to us wanting a new house. For reasons only known and understood by the local authorities the existing cottage was deemed to be of some historical significance. We disagreed with that assessment but to no avail. It was a case of limp-wristed facadism by the authorities and heritage 'experts'. Instead of abandoning our client we agreed to start from scratch, keeping the front section of the cottage and reworking it and then building a discrete fully new section at the rear of the block. I saw the project in a different light and chose to re-visit some projects that had inspired me as a young architect - Kazuo Shinohara's 'House in White' and 'House in Hanayama No 3' and Tadao Ando's 'Row House in Sumiyoshi' or 'Azuma House' as it is sometimes known. The 'Row House in Sumiyoshi' is a work of genius and I have written elsewhere about that building describing it as 'a seminal work of the second half of the twentieth century'.