takes a look at Charles McBride Ryan's own residential adaptation of Roy Grounds' 1959 space-ship design for the Canberra Academy of Science, with this new suburban home in Hawthorn. Read


DOME Home, Hawthorn: Architects Charles McBride Ryan by Norman Day 'The Age'

Roy Grounds' 1959 space-ship design for the Canberra Academy of Science was itself a revision of history: there is plainly a reference in the original design to the science of space vehicles, created using a huge, saucer-shaped blob hovering over a circular base.

It is a far-fetched, stage setting, not surprising given that Grounds had spent time designing film sets in Hollywood in the pre-World War II period.

But he also referenced classical Greek and especially Roman paradigms. Big Roman arches support the roof all round, although these are sloped into the curved surface of the saucer.

That building has been adapted anew as a family dwelling in suburban Hawthorn.

Architects Charles McBride Ryan have scuttled Grounds' idea of originality and clarity as a mechanism for producing their design. In a wanton act, freely admitted, no apologies, they have borrowed Grounds' idea and played games with it. They have captured the object, rolled it around their computer screens a few turns, deconstructed the form and regurgitated it as something else.

They have copied Grounds' design in the broad view - as a huge saucer - but this is different because it springs from the earth, does not hover, and the skin is an elegant ribbed copper.

Moreover, the architects have applied a second design ruse to their concept -similar to that of the conceptual US artist Gordon Matta-Clark. His work in three dimensions and including buildings, is characterised by a surgical slicing of the fabric, like a giant chain-saw massacre.

One of his efforts was imitated by the New York architect Peter Eisenman for a small country house, when he sliced a solid piece of building out of the entire house (walls, floors, roof). It occurred right in the main bedroom so the double bed became two singles. (No report of the success of that marriage has come to light).

So the architects' strategy is not new: it is an illustration of many postmodern works created (or should we say, wrought?) over the past decade or more.

There is a deeper level of quotations in the building - of the jutting cantilevered houses of Chancellor and Patrick (who practised in the Frank Lloyd Wright mode in the 1950s and '60s in Melbourne's suburbs).

Spaces and linkages between inside and out approach some of the early work of the Dutch/American architect Rem Koolhaas, and the chunky sculptured interiors are inbred from a strange partnering of Wood Marsh and LAB.

Interior spaces are very smart. Long, low rooms permit an easy flow of the eye (and, we would imagine, people) through the house. Whites and greens, yellows, natural timbers and burgundy brighten interiors, but they act also as a kind of instruction or signage for those using the building.

More computer-assisted analysis of the spatial characteristics of the walls and ceilings have produced a sophisticated, if slightly overstated, set of drop ceiling boxes, which act almost like a mirror reflection of the floor plan and cupboards.

The palette of materials is a slice of fashionable style - copper cladding, gabion stone walls, timber boards, translucent plastic screens and green, sheer curtains, shiny black, glazed bricks and thin, metal window frames.

There is precision in the detailing and a professional finesse is in the specification of the elements of construction. This is de rigueur for year-2000-plus architectural mannerisms, which could easily be misconstrued as modish rather than innovative, with more style than content. And it may be.

The fact is that it is a suburban, Australian house in a locality that is usually the place of middle-of-the-road conservatism. In this context, perhaps, the architect can assert that a good mannerist design will somehow fit in - dulled by the weight of references, quotes, cleverness and smart detailing - better say, than a building which may shock and alienate its inhabitants in their context.

Interestingly, the overlay of Grounds' Academy of Science drum-shaped plan is almost irrelevant at the two-dimensional plane. It can only really be understood in 3D. So the architects could just as earnestly have supplanted the Vatican, London Bridge or Meiji Shrine - without dropping their attachment to borrowing and burrowing.

Still, Charles McBride Ryan's design strategy has fashioned an appealing building, certainly unpredictable, which challenges customary standards of good manners and respectability.

What's the old cry? Must we live in such interesting times?

Norman Day is a practicing architect, adjunct professor of architecture (RMIT) and architect writer for The Age.