Above Red-tiled pool and roof terrace. Below Looking towards theentry, along two oblique walls of stacked slate.
 
Above Looking from the living/dining area to the pool terrace, with TV pod at left and the stacked slate wall of the office and games rooms at right. Below Living/dining area, looking towards the central wall concealing services installations.
| | We inhabit a world where fashions stiffen and shrivel.
Journalists write of the in-crowd’s obsessions—sex in the 60s, food in the 70s, clothing in the 80s and now design and architecture. Architects of this generation have been swift to recognise their capacity to appeal to desires for fanciful design, and none more so than Wood Marsh.
In an earlier life, they were shocking, aggressive, inventive and whimsical. Now Roger Wood and Randall Marsh have contrived a strong corporate and public presence for themselves, and they have fine buildings under their D&G belts.
They break with Melbourne traditions of locale and genius loci; they are not contextual, at least not in that way. They do not celebrate Boyd, Grounds, McIntyre or Annear, although they admire Allan Powell and before him, Guilford Bell. In fact, I doubt they think about those traditions. They aim to be part of an “international design culture”, according to Roger Wood; not one of a small town on a big island.
They have not intellectualised their architecture; they are here and now. If in the process they make buildings worthy of history’s note (and I believe they will), it will not be because they have been grasping at a place in the books—they just did it. Like Nike.
Wood Marsh don’t need to intellectualise their architecture; it is not their aim to imbue it with the spiritual or melancholic. Like Katsalidis, they can design freely— with passion, a feeling for materials, confidently with color and texture; shape can simply have its way, structure is part of their palette—and they know how to build.
The Taylor house is a fine example of the synergy that comes about when a client and an architect are on the same wavelength. Here, the architects’ desire is for abstract grey space, carved out of an old warehouse and punctuated by one sinuous pod and a red-tiled swimming pool. And the owners have furnished the place with metal furniture and artworks which intensify the tactile architecture of polished concrete floors with stacked slate walls and steel trusses.
The pod is a ‘womb-room’, a TV viewing room lined with crimson fabric and floored with cushions like an Arabian tent. It contrasts completely the stark geometry and black leather, stainless steel and white marble of the apartment. The disparity is severe, but works probably because there is a flood of daylight into the place, which softens shapes and casts its own shadows over the floors and walls.
The pod is sculptured. Coloured like a formal Roman padre in blood red and hellfire black. Why?
It may be a caprice by Roger Wood; a sort of dedication to the football team he barracked for as a child, when he was a member of the Essendon cheer squad (we do these things in Melbourne), whose colours are red and black. Or it may be a sensory reaction to the blandness and prepossessing scale of this large old warehouse space.
It is a dwelling which is “visceral” according to Roger Wood (which means ‘abdominal’ or ‘intestinal’). That is an accurate description of a residence which has a crimson womb room bleeding out of the grey concrete and slate, and a scarlet swimming pool that would put most bathers off.
I doubt the design will offend.
It is modern, fresh, aggressive and contains an abstraction which seems unruffled. It is a mature creation from these previously avant-garde architects. Most of all, it is of its place and time; part of an Australian iconography, not alien to our culture but a contribution to it.
Norman Day is an architect and writer in Melbourne |
