Marcus Tan

Terrace Houses and Lawns

The project reformulates the terrace house typology, to account for contemporary conditions in Victoria, and to introduce a capacity for communal living. Local materials, proportions, site conditions and social climates are all generative tools.

The project also reappraises what a domestic room could be today, and starts with a conception of rooms not by program, but rather by setting. Design by program, is seen as already exerting control over activities and social relations in the house before the individuals have already moved in. Design by setting, here, aims to provide rooms with different spatial qualities, characteristics, or moods, which can then be perceived by the occupant before they arrange lives and relationships within space. The capacity to express oneself is freedom.

The project further investigates attitudes toward living with the land, and proposes an alternative. One that doesn't work with notions of the picturesque for the generation of useful space, but rather, with ideas of observation, and with using intrinsic qualities of local Indigenous flora.