Canadian weatherman: clad in a rough carapace of weathered steel, this family house in Toronto suburbia intelligently integrates natural ground and built space and conceals a luminous heart - Ar House - related article: Architect - Brief Article

Architectural Review, The, August, 2002 by Brian Carter

While the steel house was important in the development of modern architecture it was primarily the liberating frame, advanced through the influential designs for the Farnsworth House and the later Case Study Houses, that prompted radical re-considerations of domestic space and patterns of living. A recently constructed house in Toronto, designed by Brigitte Shim and Howard Sutcliffe, explores the use of steel in other ways.

Designed for a site on a street where recent changes have seen modest houses built in the '50s replaced by parades of new over-scaled and generic suburban houses that show little reference for their setting, this house is a striking contrast. Unlike its neighbours marked by the seemingly inevitable plastic columns, sweeping pitched roofs and porticos placed on unreal manicured lawns, it is stretched across a curve in the street and has a monumental folded facade predominantly clad in oxide red weathering steel.

This facade--placed over a Douglas fir screen at the ground floor--has only a few windows and effectively closes the site from the banality of the street. The steel-faced external wall extends into the house to mark the entrance, form a parapet and frame the fireplace. It is only when you move through this facade and into these spaces of this new house that the extraordinary spectacle of the site is revealed. The long narrow strip of land tumbles over into a ravine and takes in the wide panorama of Toronto's city skyline and the CN Tower beyond. Almost at the horizon and on the long axis of the site, that skyline prompts a reading of a vastly expanded territory for both site and house.

The plan of the house has been developed to make a two and three storey L-shaped building with an attenuated wing extending back to the ravine. On this south-facing side of the house the steel cladding is folded back to reveal a meandering glassy wall. A series of columns registers the space within the living room while others outside define a deck and an outdoor terrace. Together these devices combine and effectively blur and soften the distinctions between architecture and landscape.

Shim Sutcliffe's work to date has enthusiastically embraced architecture and landscape through commissions to design parks, gardens and pavilions as well as residential (AR March 2000) and civic buildings. In this project they have clearly relished exploring the ambiguity that exists between the two. Here their choice of low alloy high-tensile strength steel cladding creates a rain-screen that develops a self-protective oxide layer offering natural protection and obviating the need for painting. However the use of this material, pioneered by the architects Eero Saarinen and John Dinkeloo, also creates a house that, like the surrounding landscapes, becomes a conspicuous indicator of change in time, the weather and the seasons as it changes in colour.

In addition to this cladding the roof of the lower pavilion of the house has been planted with grass and a long strip of the newly constructed garden has been made into a series of stepped, linked pools. These pools are filled with rainwater collected from the roofs above and then discharged conspicuously from a trough at the heart of the house. The pools also register the radically different seasons in Toronto by providing a place to sit or swim in summer and an unpredictable spectacle when they freeze in winter. And as the planted roof projects the site into the sky so these pools bring the sky down onto the site in a sumptuous sequence of large framed reflections.

Acknowledging the distinct character and location of this particular site at the edge of the wild natural landscape of Toronto's ravines, the scheme seeks to integrate the new development into existing ecological systems. However, while the geology, orientation and vegetation of its setting have influenced the design of the house so it, in turn, has been planned to re-construct the site and establish new ecologies that bind together house and garden. So water run-offs are controlled by the planted roofs; systems of connected waterways collect, purify and control the discharge of water and limit erosion; and the new meadow created next to the ravine has been carefully planned and planted to avoid the radical changes often wrought by suburban gardening.

Through their careful consideration of material and the details of the construction, Shim Sutcliffe have successfully integrated natural ground and built space in the design of this significant new steel house.

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Shim Sutcliffe, Toronto, Canada

Photographs

James Dow