The Fredericks-White House by Glenn Murcutt
Life is not about maximizing everything, it’s about giving something back – like light, space, form, serenity, joy. You have to give something back.
The Fredericks-White House by Glenn Murcutt, Australia’s most famous architect, is a beautiful modern farmhouse. As a sole practitioner who designs environmentally sensitive modern homes, he embodies Aamodt Plumb’s Slow Space values. Henry David Thoreau, a writer and naturalist, heavily influenced Murcutt’s architectural style. Murcutt likes to paraphrase: “since most of us spend our lives doing ordinary tasks, the most important thing is to carry them out extraordinarily well”.
In 2002, he received the Pritzker Prize, which honors living architects who produce consistent and significant contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture. Bill Lacy, the executive director of the Pritzker Prize, stated, “His is an architecture of place, architecture that responds to the landscape and the climate. His houses are fine tuned to the land and the weather. He uses a variety of materials, from metal to wood to glass, stone, brick and concrete—always selected with a consciousness of the amount of energy it took to produce the materials in the first place.”
The Fredericks-White House is located in a rainforest and directed towards distant valley views. The building consists of a double pavilion with curved roofs of corrugated metal. It’s structural frame consists of timber, which also lines the interiors. The modern farmhouse lies on a perfect longitudinal orientation along an east-west axis. The northern side has a glazed screen oriented to the sun for natural light. The southern wall is solid and implies the backside. The plot was once an old farmhouse. However, the only remaining element is the chimney, which features as a junction between the two pavilions.
This modern farmhouse won Glenn Murcutt a Merit Award for outstanding architecture from the Royal Australian Institute of Architects.
Love modern architecture? Check out our 7 Best Modern Homes of All Time!
