We designed our house and studio in the Blue Mountains and built it with Phillip Ascott, who became our collaborator. It would have been impossible to do a project like this without Phillip’s help. He was with us every step of the way, from the very first sketch drawings to completion. This is one of the best projects we have done and certainly one of the most positive – a social engagement, as well as a logistical and physical one. The many people who worked on this building helped us stay true to the vision of what we wanted it to be: a home and then a kind of art. So many amazing characters came into our lives, each with a story to tell that convinced us that we were doing the right thing by moving to the mountains. Sterling Wardell was a constant during the build, and in him, we gained a friend and someone like Phillip, whom we would happily go anywhere. And we did, crossing the Wollemi by bike and descending canyons in the Wollangambie and bushwalking together during the build. It was Sterling who inspired us to explore the wilds of the Colo River. We raved about everything along the way: politics, art, the environment, and architecture.
If we can do something like this, you can too. As Artists, we have certainly been lucky, and none of this would have happened without our families’ support; for this, we are forever grateful. We appreciate the open-mindedness of all the people who helped put this thing together. It is mind-boggling how standardized everything can seem when one sets out to design a building (with no experience and the eyes of an artist) and to do it on the budget we had and in the way we wanted it to be, driven by our aesthetic interests as much as a place to make our work in. These builder folks of the mountains are a testimony to the handmade and what a bunch of like-minded, highly skilled, intelligent and creative people can achieve. The house was built on the idea that everyday life can be as experimental as any rarefied work of Art and I think we all lived up to that ideal during the process, in other words, we had a blast. We wanted the house to project an aura, and yet, at the same time, its interior would exude a certain kind of openness and light. Despite its minimalist appearance and industrialized materials such as core-ten and concrete sheet, much of this house is hand-built. Joyce and I and a bunch of amazing students at the now (tragically) defunct contemporary art school at the University of Western Sydney hand-glazed and fired about 3,000 architectural bricks, and we also learned how to cut holes in steel with a plasma cutter, among many other things.
Is the house finished, people often ask? By most people’s standards, the answer is yes, for us, the house is an ongoing project, and undoubtedly, it will mutate and change as time goes on, as every good house does. We knew we had met someone special in Phillip; I think it was the second time we met, he was running through the door on his way to go surfing and handed us a book to read while we were struggling away with the drawings A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein of the Center for Environmental Structure of Berkeley, California, it was then that we knew we had found the right guy. If you are going to build a house, I couldn’t think of a better book to read or a better person to work with. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pattern_Language