Birdhouse
2015 / IVANHOE, VIC
Where we put things in our environment shapes our lives. The clients for this house love bird watching, so every part of Birdhouse is put in the right place to maximise opportunities for bird watching and bird photography – cooking, bathing, sitting, going to sleep – every space is strategically connected and managed to create an environment to watch birds.
In a photograph of a bird the animal itself commands our attention, but in reality the photo relies on a whole bunch of equipment invisible in the photo – the backdrop, the stage, the camera, the camouflage. The intricacy and skill in making props and burley to attract birds to photograph is more akin to fly-fishing than point-and-shoot photography.
Likewise for us, the details of our lives take centre-stage while all of the equipment and devices we use recede into near invisibility (are you aware of the screen itself, or only of the content it displays? What about the load-bearing capacities of the chair you’re sitting on?).
Birdhouse purposefully looks at this invisible equipment in order to rearrange the things in our domestic environment (room, window, furnishing), combine them with the things you use for bird photography (stage, camera, camouflage) in order to stage birds at the house. The equipment recedes into invisibility and the birds take centre-stage again – only this time the bird-loving occupant has every opportunity to enjoy their chirpy presence around the home.
The site is next to a nature reserve and is designed as an extension of it – no fences and continuous planting to encourage the ecosystem of flora and fauna to subsume the site. Trees felled to clear a spot for the house are processed into logs and clad the façade of the building. This is both sustainable and ties the house back to the nature reserve visually, but it also means the types of insects that formerly inhabited these trees will be attracted back, in turn attracting more birds to perch on the outside of the house.
A beautiful home doesn’t necessarily have to be a temple to the gods of style. Beautiful homes can also derive their beauty from being shaped around the passions and eccentricities of the owner/s.