I remember when I first came to the site, the very first visit,
I was driving along what was an old Jeep track, and I thought, wow you know, this is
very rural. As you drive up, you really have little comprehension if you haven't
been here before of what you're actually about to witness and you come over the crest of that hill.
The Point is in Southern Tasmania, and it's an amazing piece of empty
windswept farmland with incredible views out over Frederick Henry Bay,
which was quite a thing to have to contemplate in terms of inserting some architecture here.
In Queensland for example, you need to really be out of the sun and in the breeze. Whereas in
Tasmania, the opposite is the case. You want to create pockets around the building where you're
out of the wind but in the sun. The Point was placed very subtly in the contour
of these rolling paddocks. Almost as one line simply underscoring the landscape.
A very durable piece of architecture here that you could comfortable live in and enjoy
the rawness and scale of landscape that was beyond.
No matter what you place in the Tasmanian landscape, it's ultimately going to be engulfed
by it, such that the architecture itself really becomes a vessel.
The extensive glass on the pavilion itself, of course enables the breadth of
landscape to be centre stage. The light is always changing over Frederick Henry Bay, it's constantly
changing all day long from dawn until dusk. When you've got a fairly transparent building the
light reaches deep inside those spaces and often lights up the stone or the concrete,
and you're literally experiencing a light show from within the building; it's really beautiful.
I think the thing that I'm most proud of in the house
is the elemental composition and the clarity between the materials.
There is five basic materials in the building; concrete, glass, timber, steel and stone.
As a builder, you really want to try to express them as honestly as you can,
to not confuse them with each other, to make the detail where they junction clean and deliberate,
and the one thing about this building is its level of durability, how these materials were composed,
and given that they're all quite raw, it just brings about a sense of home.
And it's this combination of compression and release which gives drama to the experience.
For me, it's about constantly being taken aback by the magnitude of what I'm looking out to.
One of the aspects of having such a spectacular landscape is not only visually but also the sound.
Tasmanian landscapes and its wild places have a very deep feeling of being ancient.
You can feel history here, the history of the farm, the history of the foreshore,
the wild ocean that has been out there crashing against the rocks for millennia.
Therefore the materials chosen for this building are in some way, for the building to feel almost
immediately older and allow the building to settle more deeply into that history of where it sits.
To try and create a building that is quite open, transparent, you're bound to
try to minimise the amount of structural supports or conceal them as best you can. The idea with
this one was to use the five internal walls, the big concrete walls, as the support for the roof,
and the roof cantilevers quite considerably as well. So, uses small amounts of steel, the steel
is concealed within the building and the engineer, Jim Gandy, wove his magic on the structure.
I think Jim really has pulled that off.
There are places where this roof literally soars out over seemingly nothing. When some of the
strongest winds blow here, they go over the top of the building. Durability is sustainability.
The funny thing is, and we hear this a little bit from folk when they come
to this job, is that they'll say, "God, this house is simple, it's so simply I could do this.
It looks so easy to build". That's the interesting thing is it seems to be the more difficult
the execution, the more consideration given to the execution, the simpler they get
and in that is some form of perverse satisfaction.
When I visit this house, I simply look out. It's when you come down to a site like this which has
very little to almost no light pollution and you have a blazing fire, you sit
and listen to the sound of the ocean, and you look up and you've got the Milky Way above you,
that's why you come to places like this.
It's not so much the architecture but the architecture enables you to have that experience,
and I think that is something that has been achieved, and that is immensely satisfying.
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