Marika-Alderton House Yirrkala Community, Eastern Arnhem Land, Australia Project Date: 1991-94 Project Architect: Glenn Murcutt Size: approx. 1500 sq ft. Perspective Drawing Images of Building’s Interior and Exterior Conceptual Sketches Plan West Elevation Vertical Sections Vertical Sections Vertical Sections Vertical Section Horizontal Section Plan Elevations Biographical Details about the Architect and Residents Glenn Murcutt (born 25 July 1936, London, England) is an Australian Architect. He is also the founding president of the Australian Architecture Association. He won the Alvar Aalto Medal in 1992, and the Pritzker Prize in 2002. Murcutt works as a sole practitioner, producing residential and institutional work all over Australia. Though he does not work outside the country, or run a large firm, his work has a worldwide influence, especially since Murcutt teaches master classes for beginning and established architects. This house in Australia’s Northern Territory for the Aboriginal artist Banduk Marika, her English partner Mark Alderton and their family, gave Murcutt an opportunity to address several new challenges: to apply his architectural principles to the extreme conditions of a tropical climate; to tailor his construction and detailing to the constraints of a modest budget and a remote site with no skilled building workers available locally; and, above all, to test his own spatial concepts against Aboriginal perceptions, as this was his first opportunity to work for a private Aboriginal client. The layout of other spaces follows Aboriginal custom, as explained to Murcutt by Marika: the whole house must always be in contact with nature, apart from bathroom and utility facilities which should be placed deep inside the external envelope; and parents should sleep to the west of children (so relating age to sunrise and sunset, which represent the beginning and end of life). At the Marika-Alderton house, Murcutt revived the vocabulary of his long, thin, rural houses, but here the subtle, changing relationship between interior and exterior is explored with new vigour. The constant ambiguity between outside and inside with which Murcutt resolves the constraints inherent to a context of this type underlies a unique feature of this house: the lucid expression of the relationship between structure, roof and wall plane, treated as a skeleton, and the skin attached to it. This organic solution is clearly legible internally, because the roof structure is exposed – a departure from Murcutt’s usual practice. The Marika-Alderton house represents a radically simplified variant on his notion of an adaptable shelter in symbiosis with landscape, elements and usage. The completed house was the outcome of the increasing trust and dialogue that developed between architect and client as the scheme progressed; Marika has called it the ‘Bridge House”, because she sees it as a bridge between two cultures. Works Cited Davies, Colin. Key Houses of the Twentieth Century: Plans, Sections and Elevations. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. Hyatt Foundation. The Pritzker Architecture Prize, 2002: presented to Glenn Marcus Murcutt. Los Angeles, Calif. : Jensen & Walker, c2002. Print. Fromonot, Françoise. Glenn Murcutt buildings + projects, 1962-2003. London: Thames & Hudson, 2003. Print. Murcutt, Glenn. Glenn Murcutt a singular architectural practice. Mulgrave, Vic., Australia: Images Pub. Group, 2002. Print. .