Rhodes House Curiosities

The brief was to design a new home on the site of the previous - lost in the Christchurch earthquakes. A home that could house the clients large art collection and desires to challenge local architectural conventions. The result is a cabinet of curiosities, housing her collections, archiving the lineage of the site, and referencing local and international architecture. A Home for art, art as home. Composed as gable pavilions with a gold clad box balanced above, the space between forms a central gallery and circulation. A collection of painted characters shade this space, digitised as perforated steel screens. Pavilions are compartmentalised into a series of living scales, from the large kitchen dining space, to the reclusive homage room. Reinterpreted parameters of lost spaces, previous stud height, the glazed dining roof and excerpts of colonial language set the tone for the new form.  Playing with duality and the subversion of conventions, we have contrasted traditional local architectural typologies with contemporary form and materiality. The project reappropriates local architectural references of the Christchurch canons with heavily figured concrete work from the 60’s and 70’s and international architects Scarpa, Siza, Scharoun and Shinohara. A home as a cast, forming something other, something new.