If you sit under the shade of the balcony at the rear of the Ang House you get to experience the full scale of the cantilevered upper floor balcony. The thin edge of the floor, the white paint, and the delicate finishes highlights the notion of light and airy. But you start to ponder, it is clearly not the floor that is doing the work and there must be some other element at work here. And from the underside of the balcony you cannot see what this might be. Of course it is the full height first floor truss. And it is fully exposed on the first floor.
I was in the office of Tony and Stephanie presenting my preliminary sketches early on in the project. The rear balcony had a large cantilevered floor section that protruded over the rear yard. My proposal consisted of 380 PFC beams cantilevered out from the first floor. I was naively proud of the design, I felt it met the architectural intent and solved the structural challenge. I presented it with confidence and I never imagined that Tony and Stephanie wouldn’t accept it. And because I thought it was a good solution, I never explored any other options.
But I was wrong, they didn’t like it.
Tony’s concern was simple. Once we clad the beams, and install the flooring, these beams will result in 400 to 450 deep solid edges to the floor. The design intent was to use of soft white paint and delicate cladding to produce a light structure, which appeared to be floating through the space. This thick solid edge would disrupt this intent. The floor would look heavy and aggressive. The architecture called for something smaller and lighter. “Are there any other options?” he said.
I was shocked and never expected it would be questioned. I started to panic. My conversation turned to a stuttering wreck. I didn’t know what to say.
When I reflect on the conversation, my memory is that the conversation was lightning fast. In a panic I rattled off three or four options. Can we add columns? No. What about a truss? No. What about inclined haunches? No. What about hanging from the roof? No. I paused and with shaking hands raised my right hand to scratch my head. Time was going very slow and this pause was awkward. I wasn’t quite sure where this was going to go.
Then Tony responded, “Did you say a truss?”
The whole conversation could not have been more than 30 seconds. But the truss stuck.
Over the course of the next few months, the sizes, shapes and details for the steelwork were refined. The design had been made to expose all of the steel, including the diagonal truss elements.
During one of these conversations Tony asked, “What are the options for the connections? Or — “, he paused, “What is the simplest form of connection.”
“A squashed end,” I replied. I had used this before for temporary bracing for a large commercial building. “But you don’t want that,” I replied, "this is a house, not an industrial building.” I think Tony took this on as a challenge. He wanted this built and budget was a key driver.
Months later, during the fabrication process, Tony Chenchow rang me on my mobile. He was in a panic. “We have a problem”, he said. “I am at the steel fabricators warehouse. He has squashed one end of the CHS strut. But he is saying that when he squashes the other end there is no way that he can get them to align. There is no jig available that will hold the CHS in place while we squash the other end.”
I had used this detail before, but not in a situation that was architecturally delicate. It was on a large commercial building where a 10 to 20mm misalignment was acceptable. Here, it would end in a delicate detail that would be obviously out of place. This was someone’s home after all. Everyone cares in this environment.
Through a series of two or three minutes of understanding the problem and exploring options we finally landed on a solution. We would squash the other end. Then we would cut the CHS through the middle, spin the pieces so that they would align and weld it back together again.
This was the final piece to a long journey that started with a light cantilever balcony that was meticulously detailed. As Stephanie Little said in an interview a few years later, this is a world where structure is ornament. It was revealed, expressed and visible. It needed to be right.
In Ang House we explored the use of structure as ornamentation. The client’s brief was for a new living area opening on to a rear deck, an attic bedroom and a column-free garden space, and our response to this brief was clear and direct. The addition is a simple steel truss inserted into the rear portion of the house that eliminates the need for vertical supports for the rear deck, and enables it to cantilever almost 3m. The truss also provides lateral bracing for the existing masonry side walls, as the internal cross walls were demolished to open up the rear. The structural system performs the traditional support role, but it also acts as a device that intensifies the perception and perspective of the space. The diagonal struts accentuate the vanishing points of the space, a feature highlighted by the placement of mirrors. The new work incorporates materials of varied textures, all within a monochromatic palette, contrasting the addition to its haphazard surroundings, and the consistency of colour, diagonal struts and careful placement of mirrors, increase the sense of space and the play of light within the dwelling. –
There are a multitude of complex layers to this story. Things emerged that could never have been predicted. The initial design didn’t start with an exposed steel truss, but that is where the journey ended. The squashed ends at first appeared simple, but who could have foreseen the complexity of the fabrication. Did you sense the tension of the two conversations? They were never aggressive or adversarial, they were driven by a desire to know and learn and to achieve the desired outcome. At the time, I didn't appreciate the tension, but now I look for it, I sometimes even artificially create it. Tension is what drives innovation.
