Riverbank House has received the highest accolade for new residential architecture at the Australian Institute of Architects’ Queensland Architecture Awards tonight (June 24) taking out the Robin Dods Award for Residential Architecture – Houses (New).
Positioned high on the edge of the Brisbane River, in Highgate Hill, Riverbank House pays homage to the iconic Queenslander form. The lower level of the home is reminiscent of the understorey of a highset Queenslander, anchored by a ribbon of concrete – a fence line that transcends into the wall of the building. The home, designed by Wilson Architects, blurs the boundaries of the interior and exterior spaces that straddle the lower level living space, while the remainder of the home ‘floats’ above it.
Wilson Architects Managing Director Hamilton Wilson said the clients wanted their home to be deeply connected to the riparian site. “We set out to leverage the extraordinary landscape, as part of the experience of the property because it is so unique,” Mr Wilson said.
When the clients’ previous home in Clayfield tragically burnt down, Wilson Architects assisted them to find the unparalleled property. A unique feature of the Highgate Hill site was a landscaped easement (un-trafficable) down to the river. The easement had been hand-constructed around the same time the existing dwelling was built in the 1940s, that was left laden with asbestos and rot and later demolished.
“You rarely get a river, a significant heritage riverbank and an easement down on one side of the property that is fully landscaped as well,” Mr Wilson said. “We wanted to make the house feel like it almost continues into that landscape. If you look to the south, the house disappears and virtually floats over the river. It becomes quite visceral.”
The judges praised the architect’s biophilic approach. “Riverbank House is orchestrated between the steep landscape of the river edge and a private courtyard for a family in a suburban setting,” said jury member Dirk Yates. “The maintenance of remnant stairs and garden walls, along with the integration of native plantings, firmly imbed the new building into the historically layered landscape.”
Mr Wilson is a fourth generation architect at the helm of the family’s practice, which has been operating in Brisbane for more than 130 years. His mother, the late Beth Wilson was a landscape architect and his father Blair M Wilson was a renowned Queensland architect. The relationship between built form and landscape is often at the core of Wilson Architects’ designs. “A lot of the buildings we do have a very strong landscape idea about them,” he said. “The idea of the landscape is sometimes stronger than the idea of the house, but that becomes the house in essence.
“It comes back to the idea of biophilia, that humans possess an innate tendency to seek connections with nature. We weren’t brought up in palaces, we were brought up simply and it is that relationship with nature which is really, I think, incredibly important. As a practice, we’re very much driven by landscape ideas as the thing that drives the architecture, so you’ll see in a lot of our institutional buildings there’s a landscape component that ends up being extraordinary.”
For the clients, their home is perched on “the cusp of the natural world”. “The house is reduced to what matters,” they said. “Deceptively simple, it enables us to curate our acquired things and encourages us to be together as a family. These four walls have brought out the best in us and they are an enormous privilege to reside within.”
Riverbank House is now eligible for the Australian Institute of Architects’ National Awards, to be announced later this year.
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