B
efore embarking on his first independent residential project,
Brisbane architect Sandy Cavill travelled to Italy to indulge
in a miniature “grand tour” of architecture. His aim was
to visit the work of Carlo Scarpa and experience firsthand
those architectonic qualities with which the Italian’s work is
synonymous: stereotomic forms forged in concrete and stone,
masterfully combining sunshine and landscape. At the same time,
he was immersed in the splendour of Italian antiquities (famously
adapted to scenes of ruin by eighteenth-century artist, Giovani
Battista Piranesi) and these had an equal impact upon his sub-
conscious mind. On return to his subtropical home city, Sandy
began the conceptual design of Gibbon Street house, recalling
those impressionable weeks abroad. What emerged were the
beginnings of an imaginary “ruin” and an extraordinary archi-
tectural intervention honouring the poetics of decay.
The worker’s cottage to which Sandy was tasked to respond,
while a world away from the European architecture of his tour, is
ironically embedded in the Italian migrant community of Brisbane.
Pointing to evidence up and down the street of the Australian
vernacular adapted to sites more attuned to an Italian sensibility,
Sandy muses that the Italian influence on the built environmentin New Farm is deeply rooted and the sense of community is
strong. The architectural response acknowledges such cues as much
as it reveals the influences of his tour. Combined, they inform
a series of interventions that saw the vernacular cottage pre-
served and raised and new rooms, ordered by a series of masonry
garden walls and concrete platforms, inserted into the undercroft
and backyard.
Arrival into the ground-floor spaces of the cottage undercroft
coincides with the precise moment that attention returns to the
compelling realm of the exterior. Focus is drawn to a central garden
courtyard as a crepe myrtle tree is thrown into the spotlight against
the shadow cast by the sweeping curve of the concrete parapet
above. The boundary wall captures the sunlight and reinforces the
presence of the “ruin,” represented as a series of rendered block
walls that are threaded through the plan. Visual transparency is
maintained longitudinally, with backyard vistas framed by distant
thresholds. Passage is encouraged toward the light and landscape,
a pathway at the courtyard edge stepping up from the living room
into the kitchen and dining room. The journey culminates in the
sitting room, a perfectly scaled gathering space that hovers over a
miniature rolling landscape.02