Chapter 1: What is the significance of John Wardle's Burnt Earth Beach House?
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Well, hi there and welcome to the podcast, Big Design Adventure. This particular episode is coming to you from Kevin's hotel room where he's lamenting the fact that everything's on some weird... How would you describe... I'd describe it as a useless dimmer.
It's a dimmer that doesn't dim. Do you know what it is? It's a touchscreen from a car. That's what they put on the side of the bed. It's a lovely, lovely hotel in every respect. In the car, I go to turn the heating temperature down, and instead I'm adjusting the suspension in the middle of the motorway because you can't get any sense of where your fingers are going, and you'd crash.
And it's similar here. If you're lying in bed and you want to just turn the little side nightlight off, The blinds start going up and the windows start opening and then you're in kind of full song and dance mode with the lighting.
In the history of the world, has anyone ever had a conversation where they've said, you know what I hate? Knobs. Knobs are so annoying. You know what a shit? Switches. I hate the clicking sound they make. I hate that I can find them during the night.
Yeah, even better than just an ordinary switch is a toggle switch. The toggle switch, I once demonstrated how easy it was to use a toggle switch while carrying a laundry basket full of clothes and a tray with some tea on it and a teapot.
And you balance it all on top and you're carrying it through and you're going through the doorway and you can use either your elbow to turn the light on or off or your nose. With a toggle switch, which you can't do that with an ordinary switch. And you certainly can't do it with a bloody car heads-up display crap bollocks thing like that over there.
It's a good segue into today's guest because when we went to see John Wardle, the super award-winning architect, one of Australia's finest architects. Gold medal winner. Gold medal winner. We were trying to use one of his PowerPoints and he needed an app to turn the PowerPoint on, which was a little annoying, I've got to say. I was surprised.
I expect more actually from John because he's a man who... Critique time. John, I expect more. He's a man who celebrates and loves craft, who loves the tactile and loves the analogue, who is in love with craftsmanship and has an amazing relationship with probably hundreds of makers. And so his own personal taste in architecture is extremely traditional, actually.
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Chapter 2: How does John Wardle's architectural philosophy reflect on craftsmanship?
But I thought we'd be just feeding things into a lathe for the week. No, no, every spindle, right around the back of it and all the legs, there's one rectangular section of timber where we had spoke shaves to change the radiuses down the length of it. To taper it. The tapers, and they're different tapers, the top to the bottom. Like, unbelievable.
And the trigonometry of the legs set out and the spindles and things. God, I did my head in. I went back to work happily the next week.
So tell me, when you talk about the craftsmen that you work with, and you work with a lot of crafts people and you respect, you collaborate with, right? We do, yeah. It's always fascinating to hear from you the story of the object, why it's there, how it came to be, who these people are, where on the planet they are, what they do.
But for you, is the narrative of the object and being able to tell the narrative, is that essential?
Well, I think I like the stories and the kind of humanity that you see in an object. And when we were a younger practice and didn't have the capacity to initiate design in collaboration with others, it was my collecting from our trips overseas and op shops and junkyards and things.
What fascinated me, particularly when we travelled, was obviously the aesthetic value of the object, but I was just always intrigued by who made it and where and what era it was and what the cultural imperatives were and the technologies that sat behind that object. And so it's always been that understanding of why and how and by who it was made that sits ahead of the object itself.
Was there a turning point in the practice's work where you think actually this is what we should do more of, where you've embraced craft...
Yeah, I think it snuck up on me. My first job as a young architect, I met a guy called Greg Peter, amazing steel fabricator down at Moorabbin. I knew nothing about the fabrication of steel, but I would have this curiosity and go down to his factory and, I mean, he built scale model...
train sets he built an aluminium plane and flew it around Australia amazing guy and he I just learned through just the asking the questions and that curiosity but he became a dear friend and he made everything we didn't steal for many years until he he died you know what they're capable of and it actually enhances your ability to design things what do you like about sharing your homes with people
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Chapter 3: What unique materials are used in the design of Burnt Earth Beach House?
That's so nice, isn't it? Oh, what's that music? Oh, that's the music that they play here at Space Furniture, you know, background music.
Really? This really sounds to me like it's the theme tune for Are You Being Served.
No, no, no, no. Oh, look over there. Look at that. I love that chair, Kevin.
Oh, that's so good. That's Gaetano Pesce. It's called the Up Chair. I think it's about 1969. B&B Italia. They made it. It's amazing.
I'm so obsessed. Do you know, the idea came to him while he was in the shower, and the very first version was vacuum-packed flat, and when they unwrapped it, it slowly expanded to the delight of the audience.
Oh, no, that's amazing. I mean, that's an amazing idea for a launch, isn't it? Kind of inflating, kind of, you know, the thing appears before your eyes. You have done your research, Tim. Actually, I was just writing it off the swing tag. Ah, yeah, no. OK, so here's the question. Do you think that because he designed it in the shower that he designed it for use in the shower?
Doesn't say that on the swing tag. Oh. We'd like to thank our friends and fellow design lovers at Space Furniture in supporting this podcast. When you made a piece for the Venice Biennale, it was more a piece of cabinetry, wasn't it, than a building?
I'm probably as proud of that Venice work, some or other. It's probably one of the greatest things that we've done as a practice. We were invited to be in the Venice Biennale, in the Arsenale in 2018, and started to look at the possibilities of that. To me, my mind goes generally toward, well, How can we expand the capacity of that by drawing other people in?
So Natasha John-Smith, you're a remarkable artist and friend of mine. Gosh, she does amazing things where you dislocate your perception of space through mirrors. Maybe we could do something there. Coco and Maximilian, two young filmmakers we'd worked on since they'd graduated from the VCA. We could maybe embed a film into this object, Jack Aranda.
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Chapter 4: How does John Wardle incorporate personal collections into his designs?
but it is a pity and partly because people want so much in a family home. Cox and Carmichael, the only job I had, were about to do a celebration of their amazing work. Incredible firm of architects. Peter could design a family home all zoned spatially with no passageways. Just amazing technology.
And the architect designed project homes, weren't they?
Amazing, yes, civic homes and merchant builders and so forth, landmark homes, a series of them. They did beautiful homes. But the frailty of that era and why so much is being lost is a kid's bedroom was 2.7 by 3.6. There was no en suite. Things were small and modest and there were shared bathrooms and things.
And it partly is the want of all of those other extraneous things that's made building so expensive. And if you want that, I don't think it's hard to get the value that an architect will bring to a modestly, or to sort of tract housing or project homes.
And also there's some very fine, particularly young practices that do great work on a modest budget, but that's not, your question is really on that tract housing, the mass housing that architects have little impression in.
Mm-hmm.
I'm a young man with three kids and I want to kind of decorate my home. I want to move, find somewhere architecturally inspiring. Why should I invest in craftsmanship? Why should I not buy that thing that's advertised on the internet that looks almost as nice in the catalogue?
Well, I think you've got to bring meaning into a family home, particularly if you're bringing kids up into it. You can see so many of these houses, everything is like these homeware shops that have these kind of beige and white objects that you'd go and sit one on a sideboard and another on the coffee table and that's adorning your home.
I just have a belief that you adorn it with things that represent a family Holiday at Anglesey or a great op shop buy or whatever. And many of these things aren't expensive. I've got so many incredible things I purchase at op shops and things. I mean, you've both been down to Bruny Island.
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Chapter 5: What challenges does John Wardle face in residential architecture?
But it is like living in the most perfectly crafted cabinet in some way.
Oh, yeah. And there's energy everywhere. There are these sparks of energy kind of pinging off even in the downstairs toilet. There's a spark of energy coming off the toilet roll holder. And I'm super envious of that because it's not like there's a warm glow of craftsmanship in the building, which is what you get with a lot of architecture. Yeah.
It's like, whoa, it's like a symphony going on, you know, all the time. Lots of little exciting little moments. And of course, for him, this isn't a whimsy for him. This is about keeping his relationship with makers alive. All those collaborators love it because he's always asking them to do the hard, the difficult, the slightly impossible.
Yeah.
And thanking them for it. And then they know that they have a relationship with him. So it's keeping the relationship constantly moving in a way, which I think is interesting.
It's a great house. You can see all our videos and photos on the socials through the show notes. It's an absolute pleasure. Gosh, we've had some adventures and there's still more to come. Catch you next week.
Yes. Always a big design adventure. Thanks for listening.
You can email us anytime at hello at bigdesignadventure.com. Our Instagram is at bigdesignadventure. Audio production is by Milk Media. Our executive producer is Shelley Kemp. Our soundscape is by Kit Warhurst. This podcast is recorded all over the place, but it's mostly assembled on the lands of the Wattamedical people. Always was and always will be Aboriginal land.
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