Connected House by Albert Mo

Linked Home is the primary challenge by Albert Mo underneath his newly minted moniker, Albert Mo Architects (AMoA).1 It’s a home for Albert and his household which was initially designed by Peter McIntyre within the Sixties.

Albert and his household lived in the home for 12 years earlier than renovating it, gaining insights – historic and lived – that offered a wealthy basis for revisiting the home as a challenge. A few of these are seen to me within the structure, however extra are intimately felt by Albert and his household: “the place the solar creeps by means of within the morning, which bushes are deciduous in winter, who likes to learn by the hearth and the place the schoolbags dwell.”

The unique McIntyre plan – Williams Home – was a pure sq. courtyard home harking back to comparable regional modernisms occurring in Australian structure on the time.2 Nonetheless, and considerably mockingly, the sloping topography of Kew meant that the views introduced out from the home, moderately than inward to the courtyard. Upon getting into the home in the present day, the outlook seems as picturesque as I think about it might have been nearly 80 years in the past. It was this view that persuaded Albert and his companion to make a suggestion on the home, and he has been very cautious to take care of the attractive issues that maintain these reminiscences.

The primary transfer was to revive the north wing. From the road, not a lot has modified other than some contemporary repainting of the facade again to its authentic color. Internally, it seems as if rooms have been replanned and fitted with modern furnishings and linings but stay spatially as they had been. Solely when one enters the east wing does the modern addition seem by means of a double-volume stair that takes you as much as the extension correct. Right here, Albert’s freedom because the client-architect is really expressed by means of a triumphant glass wall to the yard and a hand-powered, mechanised, fibre-reinforced plastic (FRP) bridge. The home connects bodily and visually at this level (therefore the title) creating a brand new circulation path down into the again backyard and again inside, beneath.

As a lot as we prefer to think about so, it’s troublesome for structure to ever be really adaptable. The act of constructing is a harmful one. But the concept structure can – and may – be tailored stays highly effective. Not solely is retrofitting a extra sustainable strategy to design (we merely can’t construct like we used to), however the product of architectural commingling typically produces richer outcomes. The place one thing designed and constructed half a century in the past may be revitalised by means of a brand new connection, a brand new wall, or just a brand new perspective.

At Linked Home, Albert Mo has, in his idiosyncratic manner, expanded a household dwelling by grafting the modern wants onto and into the material of an present construction that holds their reminiscences, and others.