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Cooper Park Residence
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In the design of this family residence, Tzannes has orchestrated the U-shaped townhouse with a courtyard entry as a highly controlled sequence of vistas and spatial and axial shifts.
The strength of this house lies in its understanding and response to its site.
Studying the house itself you will see a series of designed thresholds , a progressive series of platforms stepping down the site.
It is as if the open space in front is a Fred
Williams painting stretched across the entire face of the house.
This feeling is accentuated by the fact that one is elevated high above the park.
The final threshold of the house is the outdoor terrace whose outer edge sits on a cliff-like embankment.
Looking back to the house, the long horizontal space of the living/dining room echoes the generic shelf-like open living space so characteristic of Sydney Modernism -the space sought by so many from Utzon to Leplastrier to Murcutt but with its basis in work by architects like Ellice Nosworthy, Derek Wrigley, and Walter Bunning in his own home at Mosman.
This is a space which can be opened up entirely to the elements, a space which could be the cleft in a rock face.
Tzannes overlays such a space not with the aura of holiday good-times but with gracious
urbanity and a palette of enforced material and chromatic restraint.
Like Adolf Loos's Viennese interiors of marble veneers and pale walls, this interior becomes the white flesh backdrop for the clothes, furniture, paintings and personality of its owners.
This house risks being almost too cool, too serene, in its resolution. It is, however, the next
logical step in the inevitable process of the Sydney townhouse where manners now
meet modemity.
Tzannes has reached a point in this house where, like Guilford Bell before him, the seamless notion of the good citizen without conceals a wealth of complex architectural intention within.
Cooper Park Residence Image Gallery
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