Emergence: Morphogenetic Design Strategies

Practice Profile

The Water House, Sydney, 1997–2002

This renewed terrace house was gutted and rebuilt around a new circulation core and light-well. The design makes the most of a tapering site that is 6 metres in width at the front and narrows to 3 metres at the rear. A new sunken pool and floating veiled pavilion terminate the narrow site. There is a transition from the solid heritage-protected front to the transparent new rear elevation and the pool and screened gym beyond. At night, when the screen masks the gym beyond, there is little demarcation between inside and outside space. The night sky becomes a welcome presence: lights are reflected on the surface of the water, and turned into a mirror by the black-tiled pool surface – a surface that is broken up in lattices of shadow from the screen.

Leon van Schaik discovers an element of the sublime in the recent Sydney-based work of Melbourne-educated Dale Jones-Evans. An architecture of screens, which celebrates glittering surfaces and creates soft reflexive spaces, it is one that is sensitively attuned to the Sydney latitude.

The English language creates an illusion of seamlessly shared mental space across some widely disparate parts of the world. The British and their former colonies have special ways of denigrating their samenesses, ...