IN ONE OF HIS LAST INTERVIEWS, ELIZABETH FARRELLY TALKS TO THE LATE
HUGH BUHRICH ABOUT THE LEGENDARY HOUSE HE DESIGNED AND BUILT FOR HIS
FAMILY IN THE LATE SIXTIES, SEEN HERE IN NEW PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARTIN
VAN DER WAL.
Hugh Buhrich at home
in the house he designed and built between 1968
and 1972, the “most intensely personal” of his
projects.
The water edge
facade. The house snuggles into the bush on the
northern tip of Sugarloaf Point, Castlecrag.
Looking along the
bush facade, with undulating roof and “floating”
concrete wall panel.
Buhrich describes the
house in terms of its relation to its dramatic
waterfront bush site.
Buhrich describes the
house in terms of its relation to its dramatic
waterfront bush site.
Buhrich describes the
house in terms of its relation to its dramatic
waterfront bush site.
Buhrich describes the
house in terms of its relation to its dramatic
waterfront bush site.
The main living area.
The floating concrete
panel, with dining table in front.
Looking down the
length of the house, the living area is to the
left and kitchen to the right.
The kitchen, with its
rising curving ceiling.
Concrete detail.
The wine cellar
hidden beneath a closet.
Looking along the
hall towards the bedroom.
The lipstick red
fibreglass bathroom.
The lipstick red
fibreglass bathroom.
Reason and emotion.
The sinusoidal ceiling/roof and hovering
concrete panel tucked into the bush.
AS HUGH BUHRICH tells it, his life has
been more found than made, a crooked chain of accident and
happenstance connecting Hamburg, 25 April 1911 to this sunny
Castlecrag cliff edge, 93 years on. Buhrich’s house, described
by Peter Myers as “the finest modern house in Australia”, has
something of the same incidental quality, an extraordinary,
almost casual beauty that weighs the synthetic against the
organic, balancing abstract cool with high-cal expressionism,
the deliberate with the chanced upon.
As a teenager Buhrich loved modern design but, being “hung
up” on Freud, would have pursued medicine, not architecture –
except that medicine required Latin. As a Bauhaus fan, he would
have enrolled there, except that its non-university status would
have rendered his scholarship invalid; and since the same
scholarship required him to leave home, he enrolled at a “not
very good” architecture school in Munich, because of its
proximity to Hamburg. Forcibly ejected by the Nazis in
retaliation for student political activity, Buhrich moved to
Berlin, where he worked with Hans Poelzig (“like a really first
class Leslie Wilkinson”) and met Eva, a fellow student whom he
would later marry; then to Zurich, where he studied under the
domineering Otto Salvisberg and could barely afford to eat;
finally completing his degree at a “really shocking university”
in the German Free State of Danzig, now Gedansk, where,
ironically, he was one of several students subsidized by the
Nazis in order to preserve German cultural dominance.
Eva, fleeing Germany, went to Holland, where Hugh could
live but not work, then to London. There Hugh found a cheap flat
in Hampstead but was dismayed also to find that, despite eight
years of school English, it took him twenty-five minutes to ask
for a packet of Players cigarettes. From London, with help from
the Quakers, the Jewish Institute and the RIBA librarian, they
might have emigrated to America, only it was too competitive, or
South Africa which, demanding a $200 landing fee, was too
expensive.
So Australia became the lucky recipient of Buhrich’s
undersung genius.
Even then, the path became only gradually smoother: in
1939 the University of Sydney’s Professor A. S. Hook helped the
new arrivals secure a (shared) architectural job in Canberra,
but when war broke out, the Miss Hall who had vacated the job
returned, and the Buhrichs were sent packing. Eva quickly
embarked on a writing and editing career, later publishing
Furniture Trends and Building Ideas for CSR through
the1960s and 70s. But Hugh joined the army, resuming practice
only after the war.
Even then, remaining unregistered in New South Wales until
the early 1960s, he restricted himself mainly to furniture and
interiors. “Every time I designed a building,” he says, “I would
get a ‘please explain’ letter from the registrar ...”
Nevertheless, some twenty-odd of Buhrich’s buildings were built
during those years, most of them houses, many now demolished.
His own house, largely self-built between 1968 and 1972, is
comparatively late in the oeuvre; perhaps the most accomplished
of his works, probably the most vivid and “certainly,” agrees
Buhrich, “the most intensely personal”. Described by French
critic Françoise Fromonot as “a truly radical building”, it has
become a classic cult object, more celebrated abroad than at
home. After thirty years inhabiting it, Buhrich can think of
nothing he would change “except maybe some light points and
switches”. Not bad, as client recommendations go.
Snuggled into its rocky bush setting on Sugarloaf Point’s
northerly tip, down the far, secret end of Edinburgh Road, the
house is about as remote as you can get in a global city. It is
a remarkable house on a remarkable site, and much of Buhrich’s
narrative is couched in terms of simple, practical response to
the parameters of place and praxis.
On the house’s most distinctive moment, for example, its
sinusoidal south-facing roof-ceiling, the Buhrich version goes
like this. Site-response was a given: “the Greeks,” he reflects,
“placed their temples on top of hills to stand out, but if you
build a house it has to accommodate the landscape.” Buhrich had
always wanted to live by the water, and wanted his house on one
level, facing it, but also a sense of “going downhill” towards –
hence the sloping ceiling, up from the legal minimum at the
northern edge.
At the same time, the otherwise bush-facing kitchen needed
to step up for views over the living space, but the Act allowed
no more than twenty-five per cent of the ceiling area to drop
below eight feet. So it was “just a practical response: I
decided to push the ceiling up between the trusses” – a solution
with the added virtue of admitting extra light. The opposing
curve of the copper-clad roof, explains Buhrich with equal
simplicity, arose from a need to accommodate the depth of
trusses, spanning as they do the full eight-metre width of the
house. And then there’s the bathroom, that bathroom: a seamless,
detail-less, breathtaking lipstick red, which Buhrich accounts
for as a simple development of three facts – that he’d already
built a fibreglass yacht, he’d never liked fussy bathrooms and
he did like occasional strong colours. Simple, really.
But of course there’s more to it than that. Site-response
is all very well, and this is a site of no small presence. But
every nuts-and-berries house in town was doing the same
theoretical thing, and not one of them looks like this. It’s not
just the roof. There’s also the curious angularity of the plan,
with its casual commingling of the regular and irregular
geometries; the craggy yet sprightly elevations, stamped with
great irregular concrete slabs that float like icebergs on the
cliff edge; the rough-hewn sandstone fireplace wall; the
terrifying edges of deck and stair. And the bathroom.
The essence, in many ways, is in the section: snuggled
into bush and crag it may be, but the only point at which house
and planet actually interpenetrate is the wine cellar, a secret
cavern hidden beneath a closet. Otherwise, the heavy in situ
concrete structure floats ethereal, as effortless as the
“floating” concrete wall panel under the undulating ceiling,
lending to the whole a submarine surreality, a lightness of
being that resonates endlessly with the watery view.
It’s eclectic, but consistent in its eclecticism, each
part bringing not just opposing sine curves but two opposing
world views into head-on collision: simple planar rationalism
meets organic neo-expressionism. “Yes, I suppose you could say
that,” reflects Buhrich, as though it’s the first time the
thought has occurred to him but advancing no further explanation
as to his intellectual sources. Commentators have suggested
influence from the Ronchamp and the Maison de Verre, but the
house sits more easily between two characteristically German
streams of the high Modern:
Miesian (quasi-)rationalism and the techno-organic
tradition of Scharoun and Behnisch, with their characteristic
amalgam of minimalism and expression; reason, if you like, and
emotion. The site may be absolutely Sydney, and the house may be
a wholehearted response to it, but its guiding spirit, for my
money, is a thoroughgoing, international, surreal-edged,
Miroesque abstract expressionism. ELIZABETH FARRELLY IS A SYDNEY-BASED
ARCHITECTURAL CRITIC.
AS THIS ISSUE WENT TO PRESS WE HEARD THE SAD NEWS THAT HUGH
BUHRICH HAD PASSED AWAY.
