Dome House
Hawthorn, Victoria 2004
This home in Hawthorn designed to accommodate a family, a single person, and a single person with a large visiting family at various stages of the house’s life. The design concept was to take a perfect shape, the copper sphere, and selectively remove parts to create the sense internally of being in and surrounded by garden. The spherical shell also provides beautiful internal spaces on the first floor.
McBride Charles Ryan has experimented with the fragmented sphere since the early 1990s. The desire to generate new architectural form through the cutting, fragmentation and erosion of “pure architecture” is a formal strategy with some parallels to the work of American artist Gordon Matta-Clark.
McBride Charles Ryan
McBride Charles Ryan is a practice whose studio-based approach to architecture defies categorisation. Since 1988, the firm has pursued the potential to expand the vocabulary of architectural expression. With each project, a rigorous investigation of the strategies and aspirations underpinning the brief is developed through explorations in the fields of geometric description and material palette to form unique spatial experiences.
Such exploration recognises the cultural value of the built environment. The practice believes that architecture has the potential to articulate complex issues, such as the representation of a city’s culture and identity. Rather than shy away from the ability of their work to manifest meaning, the practice is deliberate in their pursuit of bold, inspiring and engaging architecture.
The architectural idea is central to this. Emerging from the specificity of each project’s situation, it continues to inform the development of each design into a logical and aesthetically integrated whole. The results are dynamic, custom-tailored and unique; immediate and engaging to both the intellect and the senses. |
