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).

Arranging the Deck Chairs

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

fig 1. view of humbug from the street

fig 2. oblique view of the deck chairs from lawn

fig 3. part elevation of rejected facade option (drawing by Adsett)

abstract. p.1

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.

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 5. 3D diagram of the lawn and the house

fig 4. deck chairs facing into Adsett’s painting studio

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.

fig 6. view looking along the veranda with deck chairs on the left

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While Buren’s first solo exhibition in 1968 went from ‘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.

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.

“In September 1965, Buren was visiting a Paris mar-ket to buy canvas when he noticed a striped awning fabric with vertical bands, each 8.7 cm (approximate-ly 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...

...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 con-fines 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-educator-programs/teacher-resources/arts-curriculum-online?view=item&catid=721&id=37&tmpl=component&print=1 [retreived on April 29, 2014]

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

description. p.3Exhibition Description

portfolio. p.4

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.

Harte House. a new holiday house on Great Barrier Island

portfolio. p.5

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.

The New Backyard. a large suburban house alteration