1965 THE DINGLE HOUSE / ENRICO TAGLIETTI

‘THERE IS A CONCEPT I’D ALWAYS BEEN ATTACHED TO: THE PRINCIPLE THAT TO BE A MODERN ARCHITECT, ONE HAS TO SEVER ONESELF TOTALLY FROM THE PAST AND ASK QUESTIONS AS THOUGH NOTHING EXISTED BEFORE. CANBERRA WAS THE IDEAL PLACE.’ ENRICO TAGLIETTI

This generous timber deck runs the entire length of the house and is protected by the deep overhang of the roof.

View from the raised living room towards the dining area shows how the two spaces relate. The timber clad section of wall is broken by the clerestory windows which admit light from the west.

Looking towards the sliding glass doors which lead to the deck.

Italian-born architect Enrico Taglietti and Australia’s barely formed capital city, Canberra, found one another in 1955. It was a marriage of person and place that has remained almost unbroken for 52 years and, as with the best of marriages, the influence of one upon the other has been mutually beneficial.

Born in Milan in 1926, Taglietti spent his formative years with his family in Asmara in Eritrea. Moving back to Italy in 1948, he took up architecture at Milan Polytechnic. During this period, he was exposed to the teaching and thinking of Italy’s leading architectural intelligentsia. Carlo Mollino, he recalls, ‘probably influenced me in relation to Baroque form’, which Taglietti qualifies as an intention to ‘create meraviglia, to amaze the visitor’; Gio Ponti he remembers as being ‘so fresh in his approach, so naïve that he had enormous value as a teacher’. Artist Lucio Fontana, whose slicing of the canvas indicated a personality more about action than words, became a close friend. Add to the mix the teaching of Marco Zanuso, Bruno Zevi and Pier Luigi Nervi, and Taglietti’s few years in Milan enabled the formation of his enduring philosophy of an organic approach to architecture. In 1954 he attended the Le Corbusier summer school in Marseilles and worked directing the foreign entries at the Tenth Triennale in Milan, which brought him into contact with Aalto, Niemeyer and Buckminster Fuller amongst others. All in all his contacts in the early Fifties are a roll call of the postwar avant-garde architectural set both in Italy and abroad.

The photographs from this period of the Milan apartment he shared with his wife, Franca, reveal a home that is the epitome of modern style. Chairs by Mollino and a table by De Carli are accompanied by Taglietti’s own designs of a large honeycomb bookshelf comprising a series of stacked hexagons in blue, yellow and black, and a crafted, sculptural coffee table which owes a debt to Finnish designer Tapio Wirkkala. The apartment not only had style, it had panache.

An opportunity that arose in 1955 was to change the course of Taglietti’s life. David Jones, the Australian department store chain, was to host an exhibition in Sydney of Italian architecture, furniture and fashion, and wanted an Italian architect to design it. They first approached Gio Ponti, but it was Taglietti who ended up with the commission. ‘My wife and I thought of it as a second honeymoon,’ he recalls. The exhibition was a great success, as was Taglietti’s relationship with Sir Charles Lloyd Jones, who put him on a retainer. His scheduled stay of six weeks turned into six months. During this time he was sent to Canberra to find a site for a new Italian Embassy and from that moment on, it was to that city he was drawn.

In 1955, Canberra had a population of only 40,000, and its appeal to this architect from the old world was the very new-worldliness it offered. ‘There is an old concept I’d always been attached to: the principle that to be a modern architect, one has to sever oneself totally from the past and ask questions as though nothing existed before. Canberra was the ideal place.’

Taglietti is a great lover of the written word and his published work is littered with poems and literary references. The similarity between Canberra, a city without history, and Zobeide, a fictional city in Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities, was not lost on him. He felt he had found a place untouched by ‘ugliness or history’. He embraced the empty spaces and the silence. Socially, however, it was far from silent and Taglietti commented that ‘a young fellow arriving from Italy could mix without any problem with the atomic energy scholar, a Nobel laureate and with a Prime Minister’ (Sir Mark Oliphant, John Carew Eccles and Sir Robert Menzies, respectively). Taglietti wasn’t just any young architect. He would have presented as sophisticated and debonair, well-read and well-connected: a man to whom aesthetics were grounded in an understanding of site, environment, aspect, client and economics. However attractive his attributes and his Italian qualifications, he wasn’t permitted to register with the local architectural body and it was through the Department of the Interior in Canberra rather than the Board of Architects that he initially received permission to practice. It’s interesting that half a century later, he was awarded Australia’s most prestigious architecture prize, the RAIA Gold Medal 2007.

His instinctive response to Canberra and its people was rewarded by dozens of commissions over the years, ranging from houses to embassies, libraries, schools, conference centres and a cinema complex. His many commissions from the National Capital Development Commission include the Australian War Memorial Repository in 1978. He was there at the beginning of Canberra’s major growth spurt and shaped the urban landscape of this growing city.

The house shown here is from his early period, and illustrates in a domestic setting many of the preoccupations that were applied in larger, more dramatic scale, in his public works. His approach was always consistent. In his own words, he describes the process of creation: ‘First, I develop a brief, speaking with the client, and together with the client I create the basic area requirements…I then transform this floor plan in a volumetric mass and put it in context with the environment and the block of land. At this point I forget the requirements for a moment and consider only the volume. Then I play with the volume. If I cut here, if I add there, I might overhang there. What is the most suitable volume to the particularity of the site, to the orientation, to the environment and finally to the agreed brief.’ To realise these volumes his favourite material was concrete for ‘its plasticity, its ability to make any shapes or volume and still stand up’.

It is obvious that many of these ideas are at play in the Dingle House. The site was not an easy one – a steep cross-sloping block – but had the appeal of facing north at the rear and overlooking the pleasing panorama of the Federal Golf Course. The house is set back from the road and the faÇade designed to maximise privacy. No windows face onto the street and even the entrance is tucked discreetly behind a walled garden area. The half-hexagon cut-out in the bagged brick garden wall is signature Taglietti. What is visible from the street makes a strong statement, and Taglietti’s philosophy is at work here. He talks of the ‘plane of the earth’ which follows the land; the ‘vertical plane’ is subject to gravitational forces, and this he tries to break visually by use of strong shadow or, in other instances, windows that are not quite vertical. The third and, to his mind, ‘freest’ of the planes is the ‘roof plane’ and throughout his career Taglietti’s roof lines, which have in his words ‘the greatest possibility for shaping an architectural space’, are a signature feature of his work.

Here, in the Dingle House, it is the various horizontal roof planes which define the exterior space. A public building Taglietti was working on in the same period, the Associated Chamber of Manufacturers Conference Centre, employs the same timber fascia with angled edges and overlapping roof lines to cap the main structure. While the fascia are finer in this domestic setting, they are more complex in their arrangement and impart a strong sense of form. They offset the solidity of the vertical planes and create a certain dynamism through the exaggerated timber horizontals. Originally the house was bagged brick, painted white, with redwood timber used to create a strong contrast. This illustrates something of the sculptural, graphic qualities to which Taglietti was naturally inclined.

The house is not large, but the arrangement of the space is a clear interpretation of the needs of the client. In response to the site, the design solution is an ingenious three-way split level plan.

The entrance is via a walled garden and leads directly into the dining room and kitchen level. These two rooms are connected by a large serving hatch in the wall dividing them and an open corridor which runs straight from the front door to the rear of this platform, where the master bedroom and bathroom are located.

The living area, with study at the north end, runs the length of the house, and is accessed by a small set of stairs at each end of the entry level corridor. (Stairs at the far end of the corridor lead down to a children’s bedroom, guest bedroom and bathroom.)

The living space benefits from a high ceiling with clerestory windows running the western length of the room. Hence privacy is maintained but light is admitted. This extra height is clad in redwood timber which adds warmth to the space. Also connecting the split-level living spaces, by spanning the lower and upper level, is a brick column, bagged and painted, which forms the fireplace. Located centrally in the living room, it also features an open area for wood storage. The overall effect is of a continuous interconnected space, yet each with a specific function. The dining area is visible from the living area, while the kitchen is connected to both the living and dining areas. The generous deck, which faces north towards the garden and golf course, and wraps around the building to the east, is accessed directly via floor-to-ceiling glass doors from the living area. The play of intersecting volumes creates an open and fluid scheme that makes the most of the site and the available space, and clearly connects inside with out.

Decoratively, the spaces are simple. The long, slim windows and timber cladding give a measured, linear feel to the house. The colour scheme of white painted walls and wood detailing is rather like the original exterior, showing the visible connection between the two. The kitchen and bedroom cupboards reflect this aesthetic. White melamine faced and with a deep wood trim, they are designed without the interruption of handles.

The open plan living space is divided by a painted brick fireplace. A large cavity in the structure is a storage area for wood. To the right is a second set of stairs, this time linking with the kitchen so that the flow between the two levels is continuous.

This was originally a study area at the rear of the living room, separated from the staircase by a low blade wall.

As Andrew Metcalf points out in his book Canberra Houses, the Dingle House is an example of ‘Taglietti’s dual theme of sheltering privacy externally and spatial finery internally’. In fact, this level of privacy in terms of creating an almost fortress-like faÇade to the street was taken to new levels in the Paterson House (1968) and the Evan House (1971) where the life of the house, complete with internal courtyards, took place inside the enclosure. While the Dingle House is less extreme, it illustrates many of Taglietti’s architectural ideas – the play of volumes, the sense of unfolding internal spaces, the freedom expressed by the roof line and the ability to work with the site to find the optimum outcome.

The wall of glass allows the greenery to form part of the room’s decor. Facing towards the Federal Golf Course, the deck is well placed for sunlight and view.

DETAILS THE DINGLE HOUSE

COPPER LIGHT FITTING/TIMBER Taglietti designed the square copper light shades that are dotted around the house. In this instance, the light is wall-mounted to illuminate the stairs from the dining room up to the living space. The copper material is sympathetic in colour to the wooden panelling that runs along the west side of the living area, interrupted only by a slice of window. The clean palette of white walls combined with timber floors gives the space a certain warmth and humanity. This long living/study space, which runs from the front of the house to the back, is broken up by the two blade walls at the side of the staircases and the rather monumental brick fireplace at the room’s centre.

CLEMENT MEADMORE CHAIR Clement Meadmore began his career designing furniture and lighting but after the success of his first solo sculpture show in 1953, he turned his attentions purely to that medium. The Cord chair, designed in 1952, was made from mild steel rods, welded together and painted black to form the frame. The seat and back are a type of sling design using cotton braid or cord. Later, the chairs were also offered with a synthetic braid. Melbourne manufacturer Michael Hirst produced a range of Meadmore-designed products, including a dining table and glass-topped coffee table. Taglietti knew Meadmore and had, in fact, commissioned him to create panels for a motel project he was working on.

KITCHEN While the kitchen is compact, it is well designed and conveniently located. A large serving hatch (which originally had a fold-down bench on the reverse side) directly accesses the dining room, and the kitchen is also open to the main corridor. The stove, with its splashback of white ceramic tiles, has plenty of serving space adjacent to it. The generous drawers and cupboards are of white laminate with deep timber edge detailing. The design requires no handles and became something of a Taglietti trademark. He favoured this treatment for wardrobes both in this house and others of a later period.

BAGGED BRICK WALL While Taglietti favoured the plasticity of working in concrete due to the immense flexibility of form it could deliver, the Dingle House is of brick cavity wall construction which was rendered and, originally, painted white. A means of breaking up the visual solidity of the wall is Taglietti’s signature void – in this instance a half-hexagon shape seemingly cut out of the brickwork. Architecture, in Taglietti’s view, ‘should achieve being a piece of art’, and his buildings all have a supremely sculptural quality. Much later, in 1978, Taglietti’s celebrated War Memorial Repository in Canberra utilises a dynamic geometric opening in the walled building to great dramatic effect.

NOGUCHI LIGHT The 1N is one of the smaller lights from the vast range of Akari lights designed by Japanese-American Isamu Noguchi. In the 25-year period from 1951, Noguchi designed over 100 lights for traditional Japanese paper light manufacturer, Ozeki & Co in Gifu. Available in table, floor and pendant varieties, the shapes range from the geometric to the biomorphic. Each light is assembled in hand-made paper from mulberry bark known as mino-gami. This paper has a softness that diffuses light beautifully and is less fragile than the cheaper rice paper commonly used. The fine bamboo ribs are still wound by hand around the original wooden block moulds which were made to Noguchi’s specification.

WINDOW Slim windows are used throughout the living space to admit light but maintain privacy. Not only is the vertical window (shown above) used, but horizontal clerestory windows also run along the west-facing wall in the living area, ensuring daylong light. Privacy was something Taglietti strove for in his houses and while this house does not quite turn its back to the street in the manner of some Sydney School houses of the period, it is certainly giving it the cold shoulder. Internally the house has an open-plan feel, albeit on different levels, and all the generosity of view is concentrated at the back where large glass doors face towards the golf course.

Neville Gruzman’s perfectly sited house, at the end of a cul-de-sac, with dramatic views over a gorge. Privacy was created by Gruzman’s landscaping – a series of man-made hills on the approach to the house to screen it from view. The cantilevered platform is part of a major extension to the house in 1983, also by Gruzman.