There are opportunities in restriction. At least that's what every architect is taught. Throughout the practice, the restriction is everywhere: in the customer's customers, its budget, planning controls, the restrictions on the available craftsmanship and the construction. The architect is taught that these are the limits that influence our efforts. Successful architectural work therefore apparently finds a balance in which all restrictions are conveniently taken into account and yet in combination are transferred to a little more.
When Ciliberto Architects was addressed by three generations of a family to build them a new home, the letter was simple: the budget was tight, they needed bedrooms for every family member (a total of seven) and the location was restricted. The area is located on an exposed corner in Sydney's inner suburbs and is overlooked due to its fall from the street and the neighboring apartment blocks, which are exposed to the location directly. An existing, dilapidated cottage had made a home available to the grandparents for many years, but the family had decided that it would be uneconomical to renovate.
Ciliberto Architects thus designed a new home under a corresponding development code path, which minimizes and simplifies the approval times. The practice understood the budget that the letter had to be made easier in a single step – a unique moment that would set up the organization of the house and the solution of its structure. The design of the house revolves around a concrete cross -shaped, 1.3 meter deep concrete bar, 2.2 meters above a ground floor that holds a studio and a garage underneath. The rays are held at their four ends by concrete leaf walls that define the outer shell of the building. These rays and columns are expressed in order to make the structure of the building readable. This solution is structurally efficient and economically in the provision of a three -story masonry apartment. The depth of the rays delivers the walls of the side of the side, which means that they are submitted for the structure and remove every question of the superfluousness.
The crucifixion becomes the organizational device for the house and creates a plan in quadrants. The new house is designed in such a way that it looks inwards. The design opens in its center to offer a look at living rooms with an increased courtyard that is walled and buffered by the street. The bedrooms are located in the private side of the house on the floor and in the lower floor soil, whereby the grandparents are housed, while a densely planned first floor offers rooms for children and parents.
The interior is direct and a result of the robustness of the building image form. The architects describe the facade as “armor instead of costumes”. Sandy pink bricks, which are not unlike those of the 60s apartment blocks, are worked with Talgwood flooring, aluminum windows and the off-form face of the concrete cross-shaped cruciform. The windows are carefully considered by using solid glass panes to economically framework curated views from the interior. Operable and more expensive panels are then deliberately placed for paths between the rooms or as doors for ventilation.
The house is compact, but finds the generosity in the scale through the placement of rooms with double heights over stairs and the continuous presence of the cross rays. Carpentry and screening are designed as porous elements to enable transparent separation throughout the floor plan. Exercise director Anna Ciliberto calls the house “deliberately strict” and hopes that the house will become a backdrop for life and the objects of the family – in accordance with a greater ambition that practice has. In fact, the house feels honest and unpretentious in its directness, resilient for the next chapter of the life of this family.