Tunnel House

RESEARCH BACKGROUND The Tunnel House by Graham Crist and Stuart Harrison was a private commission for a second-floor added to a brick cottage. The existing house is in a middle-class Melbourne suburb on a small site. The project was to build above the existing house, doubling its size and recycling the existing form. RESEARCH CONTRIBUTION This project addresses residential design, in particular, the architectural addition to a suburban house. It asks how questions of architectural form and composition can take shape with a highly constrained budget, land plot and planning regulations. The design process negotiates the value of heritage-listed, low-rise built environments, as well as conventional domestic timber construction, to produce a sculptural architectural form. The design strategies are applicable to a wide range of inner-suburban conditions, promoting urban density and diversity of housing types in areas commonly overlooked by contemporary architectural work. The general tactic to treat the new top floor as a roof space responded to the required conservation of the house's low-rise character. This also influenced material choices and the built form. Setback requirements meant that the form was located centrally on the site and pushed forward, thus offsetting it from the walls below. A gentle distortion of the tube-shaped frame exaggerated this sculptural effect. RESEARCH SIGNIFICANCE The design was short-listed for the RAIA Victorian awards in the Residential category. It was published in the 2003 Residential Issue of Monument magazine and subsequently in Design City Melbourne by Leon van Schaik and Architecture Next by Davina Jackson.