Arranging the Deck Chairs

Arranging the Deck Chairs
abstract. p.1
fig 1. view of humbug from the street
In my work a project often boils down to a few key
elements. Those elements emerge from several
different kinds of conditions: the site, appropriate
building components, local and personal contexts,
disciplinary conventions, and everyday life. In a
house and studio that our practice designed on
Mornington Peninsula for painter Peter Adsett and
his family, called Humbug, one of those important
elements was a built-in deck chair repeated along
one facade (figs. 1&2). The deck chairs provide a
useful vehicle to explain how I mediate these various
conditions.
We explored several design approaches to this
facade before we concluded on the deck chairs.
While exploring interesting ideas that potentially
link painting and architecture, the options that we
ultimately rejected all seemed slightly pretentious,
or over designed. They included relatively complex
operable screens, reflective glass, and an application
of one of Peter’s own compositional techniques to
the painting of solid panels (fig. 3).
fig 3. part elevation of rejected facade option (drawing by Adsett)
fig 2. oblique view of the deck chairs from lawn
The deck chairs helped make the project feel real,
in the ‘keeping it real’ sense of the word. They
are an everyday thing. But, through Daniel Buren,
they have also become canonised by high art. Like
Buren’s work they are made from typical deck chair
fabric, a black and white striped synthetic canvas,
and simply stretched between three metal rods
that span between the columns. They are also an
integral part of the way the studio is used, being the
abstract. p.2
fig 4. deck chairs facing into Adsett’s painting studio
place where Peter sits to drink tea and reflect on a
painting’s progress. We recognise them as part of the
everyday, and the canon. These everyday things are
driven by a slightly satirical conscience of mine that
mediates between the discipline and the ordinary.
Each chair is just less than 1200mm wide, which
is the distance between the structural columns
they fit between. 1200mm is the size of most of
the paintings that Peter produces, and obviously a
standard panel size in the construction industry. The
fourteen 1200mm painterly canvases are mounted
in their structural frames behind a square lawn that
occupies the centre of the site.
fig 5. 3D diagram of the lawn and the house
The lawn is framed by circulation paths and trees on
three sides, and the columns and chairs on the other.
These columns form part of a geometric scaffold for
the whole house that quite literally frames pieces of
site, and pieces of building. That scaffold is driven by
an urge to fit things into a framework that mediates
between the site and the building components.
The deck chairs form part of the veranda that
occupies the edge of the building facing the lawn
(fig. 6). It is the most public elevation, and for a
house that is inevitably about painting as much
as architecture, this elevation is on permanent
‘exhibition’ to the public. The play between dark
and light that begins with Daniel Buren, continues
across the rest of the facade. The veranda itself is an
Australian icon, even if chairs on a classic veranda all
face out over an endless landscape and these ones
face in to the painter’s studio walls (fig. 4).
fig 6. view looking along the veranda with deck chairs on the left
Painting, Australian typologies, exhibitionist façades,
and framed lawns are all part of a broad contextual
narrative for this house that comes into focus
through the veranda. This boundary of the building
is the critical interface that mediates between these
numerous local and personal contexts.
These three mediators – my satirical conscience of
the everyday, a geometric scaffold to frame pieces
of site and pieces of building, and a critical interface
through which to focus local and personal contexts
– are relatively consistent in my design process, but
sometimes manifest themselves differently as the
conditions change. I bring these mediators to bear
on each other in pursuit of something richer than
one could find on its own, and in this case, I bring
them to bear on some very simple deck chairs.
Exhibition Description
description. p.3
fig 7. Buren, Apollinaire Gallery, Milan 1968 (part photo)
http://www.catalogue.danielburen.com/fr/expositions/29.html
[retrieved April 30, 2014]
fig 8. sketch of the proposed exhibition
“In September 1965, Buren was visiting a Paris mar-
While Buren’s first solo exhibition in 1968 went from
ket to buy canvas when he noticed a striped awning
fabric with vertical bands, each 8.7 cm (approximately 3.5 inches) wide, which were alternately white
and colored. Buren began using this fabric to create
his own art, but he gradually realized that paintings
in this reduced state had no intrinsic value. He had
stripped painting down to its core, or “degree zero.”
The striped fabric now derived its value from the
place where it was exhibited...
‘From Painting to Architecture’ by gluing striped
material to the outside door of the Apollonaire
Gallery in Milan, I propose to hang three deck chairs
on the wall of the conference exhibition space. The
chairs would be mounted to the wall approximately
1m above floor level so that their centre is at eye
level. They would be viewed as “Paintings” and we
would have gone “From Painting to Architecture
and Back Again” in 46 years. Instead of art as part of
everyday life, everyday life is presented as art.
...For his first solo exhibition in 1968, Buren glued
white-and-green-striped material to the outside
door of the Apollinaire Gallery in Milan, Italy (Anne
Rorimer, “From Painting to Architecture,” Parkett
66 [2002], p. 62). The same year Buren pasted 200
striped posters on Paris billboards and other spaces
reserved for advertising. His action at once protested
the proliferation of advertising and testified to the
boundlessness of art when released from the confines of the gallery and museum. For Buren, the work
of art should not be limited to traditional forms. Art
can happen in the streets: as a part of everyday life.”
http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/education/school-educatorprograms/teacher-resources/arts-curriculum-online?view=item&catid
=721&id=37&tmpl=component&print=1 [retreived on April 29, 2014]
In front of the three deck chairs on the wall I propose
to lay out a series of drawings, photographs and
text that explain the broad contextual narrative.
That narrative must of course include a discussion
of painting, which I propose to include through
a Q&A with Peter Adsett. By exhibiting the deck
chairs literally (the everyday object), as a triptych
(the geometric scaffold), above an altar-like table
of annoted images (the critical interface), I hope to
use the exhibition as an example of my mediators at
work.
Harte House. a new holiday house on Great Barrier Island
Triangulated planes form the geometric scaffold for this
house on a long slope, on a 70 acre plot of land. It is
planned as part of a network of small buildings on the site
connected by a network of paths. The critical interface
is that between the path and the house. The path is the
width of a 4-wheel motorbike and the main living space is
enclosed by a proprietary sliding canvas wall designed for
the trucking industry.
portfolio. p.4
The New Backyard. a large suburban house alteration
The geometric scaffold of this large alteration was
determined by the existing house, and the series of roof
planes that climb up around a new central courtyard. The
courtyard was pitched to our clients as ‘the new backyard’
that would provide the space for everyday life, like cricket.
The original house had several features of the arts & crafts
which became a launching point into several experiments
with timber fabrication and ornament.
portfolio. p.5