Below Cross-section of the Ball-Eastaway house. The living area with its vaulted ceiling receives daylight primarily through ceiling-high windows on the front sides and several roof windows.
Opposite Only a long wooden bridge connects the house to the land on which it is built. Murcutt dispensed with a prestigious entrance. The house looks like an object that has been temporarily deposited and could disappear without trace at any time.
BALL-EASTAWAY HOUSE, GLENORIE (SYDNEY) NSW, 1980–1983
The Ball-Eastaway house is an exemplary illustration of Murcutt’s approach and ethics, and one of the most beautiful successes of his domestic architecture from the eighties. Here, Murcutt tested for the first time the possibility of a light dwelling, entirely made from corrugated iron, creating the frugal and refined house, which was to become his style of construction, and thereby launching his international reputation. This small, very economical house (less than 100 square metres for around 40,000 Australian dollars at the time) was requested by a couple of painters from Sydney, who wanted to leave city life and install themselves in the forest close to the national park which borders Sydney to the north. The house is raised on thin piles in order not to disturb the natural flow of water on the slope; it only touches the rock with seven pairs of posts made of thin metallic tubes. Two wide, flat gutters channel rainwater from the rounded roof towards the downpipes, monumentalised by their symmetrical nature at the two extremities of the abode. They constitute an effective method of drainage as well as an expression of the im-
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portance of water in this dry, highly flammable landscape. The living spaces are divided in the layout according to the symmetries and balances suggested by the construction of the house, the climatic movements and the views. Kitchen, bathroom and storage, lit from overhead by fanlights, are grouped against the entrance façade, which is totally blank and southeast-facing, on the side of the inclement winds. The house has two verandas. This traditional space in the Australian house is here reinterpreted as a place archetypal of the ambiguity between the outside and the inside. To represent the gradual transition between the built order and the natural order, Murcutt stripped the floor and the roof of the large veranda of their finishing materials, at the boundaries with the earth and the sky. To reinforce the impression of a precarious but serene balance between the building and the landscape, he suspended above the rocky plateau, which extends under the house, a fragile access bridge, perfectly horizontal, and treated the two long vertical walls as thin suspended planes.