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A house in a frontier environment and set to encourage freedom as a super-insulated and permanent tent within an inland southern New Zealand basin. A landscape of big sky and barren, open ground with extremes of temperature interchanging between winter permafrost and summer arid heat. Of pioneer gold panning tent villages, summer holidays and wild thyme plains.
Sheltering against a southern plantation forest, the house shapes to Antarctica's Roaring Forties weather to generate a series of intermediary protective spaces interspersed with pathways and water channels connecting and fingering to the landscape. The wilderness remains unadorned and wild; fence free.
The house places an externally insulated concrete core, as 'tent', beneath a sheltering 'fly' to articulate an interior. Planning follows the patterns of a braided river connecting the independent guest accommodation, garaging and entry, to the northwestern open living area. Program for the home's two inhabitants meanders between the edge condition of perimeter hallways to form a collection of hobby and retreat spaces hunkered away from the elements. An anti-villa approach, providing variance to life's internal pathways when the conditions simply prohibit external activities.
Tent walls provide a generic palette upon which to measure the changes in season and are continually finished externally and internally in a uniform renderer. Fly roofs constructed from freezer panels resist the elements and provide summer shade, while being tilted and sheen finished to reflect and share low level winter light. Retreat sitting, library, bedroom spaces are then comforted back within the tent and enclosed and warmed with timber linings away from the extremes of the exterior environment. Hints of yellow to joinery references the owner’s art collection and initiates the eclectic camp-style arrangement of furniture and a life now equipped to wilderness.
Irving Smith Jack Architects Ltd
Irving Smith Jack Ltd (ISJ) has been developed as a niche Architecture practice working in a variety of sensitive environments and contexts throughout New Zealand and recently internationally.
ISJ demonstrates an ongoing commitment to innovative, sustainable and researched based design , backed up by national and international award and publication recognition, ongoing research with both the Universities of Canterbury and Auckland, and regular invitations to lecture on their work.
JEREMY SMITH
B Arch (Hons First Class), BBSc VUW, B.Sc, ANZIA, Registered Architect
In his role as Design director at Irving Smith Jack, Jeremy has lead a range of ISJ’s design innovations, including the competition winning and subsequent award winning NMIT Arts & Media, and Whakatane Library and Exhibition Centre buildings.
Jeremy has over 10 years of experience working as a design architect in design lead practices in New Zealand and Australia. In addition to larger public projects, Jeremy’s residential and public work has been widely published in New Zealand and internationally, and rewarded with a string of awards, including NZIA New Zealand Architecture awards in public and residential categories, New Zealand’s top timber design award in both residential and commercial categories, invitation to present at the World Architecture Festival in Barcelona 2011 and Singapore in both 2013 and 2014, commendation from the NZ Concrete Society, NZ Property Council Excellence Awards, as well as numerous NZIA local architecture and magazine awards.
Jeremy has widely lectured about the practice’s work, has served as a New Zealand Institute of Architects National Councillor, been appointed to architecture award juries at a national level, and was invited to the Super Jury at the World Architecture Festival in Singapore 2014. Following graduating as Victoria University’s top architecture student and receiving the Victoria University Centennial Medal for post graduate achievement, Jeremy is currently completing a design based PHD through Auckland University undertaken between practice commitments.
