Mastering the Line

Hundreds of competitors (as individuals or in teams) from around the world had joined the race for the juried prizes since the contest was announced last year. These talented people submitted projects belonging to the several departments of visual imagination celebrated by the awards: landscape, residential and commercial architecture, office and shop interiors, lighting and furniture design, among others. There was a trophy for student work, one for unbuilt schemes and even one for unrealized – perhaps unrealizable – concepts.

Taken together, the winning projects in these various categories constitute a vivid glimpse of the advanced creative forces currently at play – forces that are broadening and enriching the textures of the built environments in which we work, play, sleep and shop, as well as pray. (The AZ Award for school work went to University of Waterloo student Alex Josephson for his “temporary mosque.”) To get a taste of what I’m talking about, drop by the gallery at Harbourfront Centre, where the winning ventures will be on display until Sept. 25.

Readers of this column will find one of these projects – the winner for residential architecture – especially interesting. Called Linear House and situated among orchards and hay fields on British Columbia’s Saltspring Island, this dramatic modern building comes from the studio of celebrated Vancouver architects John and Patricia Patkau.

Clad in some cozy, humane material such as cedar planking (let’s say), this geometrically rigorous house might appear to be kinfolks with some other similarly plain, weathered artifact in its gentle rural context, such as a covered bridge or a long farm shed. But that’s not Linear House. The Patkaus have strongly underscored the urbane sophistication of the structure by sheathing it in dark grey cement and fibre panels (a Swiss product) – a move that gives the house an atmosphere of weight and seriousness foreign to farm architecture.

In a recent conversation, Mr. Patkau told me this dark cladding helps the house recede, almost to the point of invisibility, into its background of mature Douglas fir trees and other rural greenery. I’m prepared to believe that’s the effect in the real world, though in photographs the sombre siding makes the house’s exterior demeanour seem unduly aggressive.

But be all that as it may, the interior of Linear House is a marvel of lightness, warmth and supple spatial flow. The streamlined millwork is made of maple. Instead of dropping in opaque drywall to define the various areas of this very open structure, the Patkaus have divided rooms and covered walls with translucent white plastic sheeting. The living, sleeping, cooking and dining areas are illuminated by sunshine falling through myriad skylights during the day; by night, fluorescent lighting scatters a soft glow throughout the white-surfaced interior.

The climate of Saltspring Island, Mr. Patkau said, is like that of northern California: bright and temperate, and considerably drier than either Vancouver Island (which it’s near) or the B.C. mainland. Canadian nature loses its characteristic harshness in such a place, and asks to be allowed into the inner precincts of a dwelling. The Patkaus have generously obliged this request by opening up the long exterior surface of Linear House with enormous top-hung doors that, in fine weather, can slide away and disappear into the walls. The longest of these apertures extends a full 78 feet.

Many people, I suspect, would rather not live in quite such intimate proximity to nature; I know I wouldn’t. Nor would I want to live in a house this serious about its modernity. But that’s what makes architects the valuable people they are: the ability of the best of them – and John and Patricia Patkau are in the top tier of Canadian designers – to translate imaginatively the dreams of their clients into the stuff of reality. For its muscular originality and rigour of execution, Linear House deserved the prize it got in this first round of Azure’s AZ Awards.
John Bentley Mays

True to its name, the timber-framed year-round home is a long and narrow, ground-hugging, flat-roofed oblong, a composition of flat surfaces, rigid right angles, dead-straight lines – no curves allowed. The volume of the building is divided by a breezeway into two parts. In one section, the owners live and cook – the bold sweep of space devoted to kitchen and dining area suggests that these people do love to entertain. In the other part are guest suites.