Pacific Switch: The Palm House, Mosman, Sydney Australia by Casey Brown Architecture

by Philip Drew

“What Greene and Greene seem to have arrived at is almost craftsmanship as a style of decoration and way of ordering the visible elements of the structure, a repertoire of usages for shaping ends, fixing brackets, notching corners, strapping joins, pinning mortices—if it was anything you could do with wood, they found a way of making decoration of it; and the technique spread to other materials, too...”

Reyner Banham, ‘The Master Builders: 5’, The Sunday Times magazine. July, 1971, p. 23.

The connection between Australia and America is a long standing on reaching back to the discovery of gold in California, and only deepened with the passing years most notably in the early twentieth century the borrowing of the Californian bungalow in the early twentieth century.

Casey Brown’s Palm House reconnects Sydney with the West Coast, specifically, with the carpentry of Charles Summer and Henry Mather Greene in Los Angeles, and less obviously with an earlier master, Bernard Ralph Maybeck. The result, a splendidly located expansive wide eave, airy shelter surveys the city CB and North Sydney towers. These days architecture is nothing if it is not an astonishing, jaw dropping sculpture spat out from a computer. How a building is built is the very last thing considered. The Mosman house is the reverse of this of architecture trapped in a shouting competition to see who is loudest. The Mosman house refuses to astonish and bewilder, and instead, revels in, and celebrates traditional craftsmanship from a bygone era described by Reyner Banham. Zinc roofs graciously extend far out beyond walls on braces to protect louvred windows. The comfortable L- plan is tucked into the southwest so it frames the ,corner leaving the north free for landscape and recreation.

Is it possible to do good architecture, be noticed and admired, without sensational shapes that desperately attempt to shock. The Mosman house delivers a resounding yes, with a further additional punch. Respect for craft and the nature of materials, can deliver something far more precious, more lasting, durable and satisfying, architecture without artifice, that is not forced and tortured to the extreme in the chase for some momentary effect.

One should ask whether we can learn to create richly reassuring buildings once more, not in a silly shallow way as did Post-modern, but through a thoughtful and intelligent respectful reconsideration of the past.

PHILIP DREW, ANNANDALE, AUSTRALIA