Tropical house - experimental house for an extended Aboriginal family

Architectural Review, The, Oct, 1996

The Australian Aboriginals have had awful difficulties in coming to terms with living in a country dominated by an urban, industrial culture, not least in housing. Largely nomadic peoples, used from time immemorial to living in a very complex way with nature, are given poorly ventilated and lit solid masonry boxes by a (more or less) benificent government. The unhappy results of totally inappropriate housing (dereliction, desertion and so on) have caused some even usually liberal Australians to call for the more or less forceable assimilation of Aboriginals into Western culture, just as many native Americans were forced to join general society until quite recently. But there must be another way, which will be mutually beneficial to both cultures.

Glenn Murcutt was asked by Marmburra Marika, a distinguished Aboriginal artist, and her husband Mark Alderton to design a house for them in the Yirrkala Aboriginal settlement near Gove in Arnhem Land, deep in the tropics on the north-west corner of the Gulf of Carpentaria. Murcutt persuaded a reluctant Northern Territory Aboriginal Housing Authority to grant as much money as it would have done for one of its conventional masonry bungalows.

The site is magnificent, on a narrow spit, with the beach and sea to the north (the sun shines from the north in Australia) and a dense grove of mangroves to the south-west. Murcutt adopted his usual approach to planning on a rural site, with a variant of his long thin pavilion which addresses the main prospects, and utilises the prevailing winds to cool the interior.(1) The house faces the beach and is made as a series of six steel portal frames that carry a deck a metre over the sand, above which is a pitched metal roof supported on hardwood purlins.(2) The structure has to be capable of withstanding cyclones of up to 63 m a second, and is very rigid, bolted down to piles sunk deep into the sand, with big sheet flanges coupling columns to rafters; the longitudinal bracing of the purlins is complemented by a rectangular frame of rolled joists which supports the floor.

Outside the skeleton is the skin, made of marine ply or slatted tallow-wood shutters. Almost all the panels can be raised from vertical to horizontal, making the house into a shaded platform looking into the bush and out over the sea. It is a contemporary reinterpretation of the immemorial Aboriginal shelter, made of branches and leaves, examples of which can still be seen round about. At night, the panels of the house can be closed, but it still continues to breathe through the shutters, through the floor (which is an open timber deck so that sand can fall through the slots) and through the ventilators on the roof. These revolve and use the Venturi effect to extract hot air continuously from the roof volume (they also serve to equalise internal and external pressures in a typhoon, so reducing the tendency for the roof to be sucked off).

In plan, there is a big living room at the east end for eating and cooking and sitting about the platform -- then, working westwards, Murcutt uses his notion of the service wall(3) to incorporate alcove bedrooms for transient members of the extended family, before arriving at the master bedroom which terminates the plan.

Murcutt says of the users that `they can work the building. The slats are such that they ameliorate the light levels between outside and the inside [so] that the cones and the rods of the eyes are not fatigued by the glare factor. This building can do as they want it to do. ...They'll learn to sail the craft.'(4) Marmburra Marika speaks of the house as bridging the two cultures, but the bridge was not built without cost. Murcutt and his engineer James Taylor waived their fees, and the steelwork for the experimental project was provided free by BHP. The builders, Simon Thorpe and John Colquhoun prefabricated all the components at Gosford in New South Wales, packed them, transported them huge distances across Australia by rail(5) and assembled them with great care on site.

Plainly such an operation is not capable of replication on a large scale. Clearly, it offers lessons. As Murcutt says, `I would like to think that there are parts of this building that by demonstration ... would say it's an appropriate way of doing things. Why don't we incorporate some of them? Not all of them, but just some of them to make living here by the water as beautiful as it can be. It can only be by example that things change.'(6)

(1) See for instance the Ball-Eastaway House at Glenorie (AR December 1985) and the Magney House at Bingie Point (AR February 1986, pp 70-75).

(2) Australian architects are extremely lucky to have such an abundant supply of native hardwood, which can be used structurally in ways that are quite impossible for northern architects who are predominantly restricted to structural softwood. Murcutt has an astute understanding of the properties of local timber.

(3) Seen for instance in the Ball-Eastaway and the Magney houses.

(4) Quoted by Hyatt, Peter, `Northern Light' Steel Profile, No 46, BHP Steel Group, Melbourne, 1993, p8.