Architecture
Winner of the heritage category in architecture’s Oscars, the restored Lucas Glass House is a modest structure on the very edge of the possible. By Naomi Stead.
Restored Lucas Glass House a highwire act
Bill and Ruth Lucas might be the most influential Sydney architects you’ve never heard of. The 1957 Glass House is certainly their most cultishly admired building. Following conservation and restoration works by Cracknell & Lonergan Architects, it has won the Lachlan Macquarie Award for Heritage at the Australian Institute of Architects national awards, announced in Adelaide last Thursday. These are the Oscars of the Australian architecture world and this is the highest award in the heritage category. Full disclosure: I was a member of the jury.
The Glass House is indeed a cracker. It’s regularly put forward as the finest postwar house in Sydney – although there is some stiff competition even in its immediate locale of Castlecrag, with two fine houses by Hugh and Eva Buhrich, one by Peter Muller and others by the authors of the suburb, Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin themselves. But while those houses all use masonry in heavy and rusticated style, the Lucas Glass House stands as an amazingly light work of structural bravura: a house in the trees, strung up high above a steep and rocky gully that turns into a cataract in the rain.
The structure is breathtakingly spare, held up on four slender columns, each only 7.6 centimetres square and bolted to the rock below. As delicately balanced as a trapeze platform, it’s a building propped, cantilevered and wound tight with steel tension bracing. The volume is a kind of glass sandwich – stiff roof and floor planes holding together the light, timber-framed glazed walls that give the house its name.
Experimental glass buildings are celebrated in the modernist canon, beloved by romantic expressionists and industrial rationalists alike. They’ve often also been uncomfortable, sometimes close to unliveable. Edith Farnsworth, the patron and denizen of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s 1951 Farnsworth House, battled excessive temperatures, condensation and mosquitoes on top of the monumental ego of her architect. Meanwhile, even the relentless self-promoter Philip Johnson had to put up signs around his own 1949 Glass House, pleading for privacy from unwanted visitors. Afficionados might favour the more obscure 1932 Maison de Verre, a temple of glass bricks by Pierre Chareau and Bernard Bijvoet in Paris, or Lina Bo Bardi’s 1950 Casa de Vidro, an elevated platform amid the canopy of a São Paulo rainforest.
While the Lucas Glass House is also set in a lush, gorgeous landscape – muscular with tree ferns and outcrops of Sydney sandstone, every moist cranny harbouring a lizard – to think of it as solely a place for looking outward, a paean to the transparency and translucency of glass, is to miss the point. It’s more the outcome of a highly economical system of construction. There are clues to be found in Ruth’s visits to the Eames House in California, and Bill’s close engagement with the ideas of Buckminster Fuller – both seeking to build with maximum frugality and minimum materials.
The Lucas Glass House was itself partly a product of necessity. Built just after the postwar austerity period, it was financed by a war service loan as a home for the newly married Lucas couple as they awaited their first child. Bill was a builder as well as an architect and constructed the Glass House – like many of his designs – with his brother. It was built thriftily, from standard materials bought off the shelf at the hardware store. The house has a distinct ethic: the minimalism here is not an aesthetic affectation but a matter of reduction in material, structure, space and impact on a delicate site. Nowadays a tree grows through the house, popping up through the light well – an apt allegory for the architects’ approach.
The plan is clear as a bell: a rectangle made up of a four by three cell grid of identically sized interconnecting rooms, with the middle two modules left open for a light well that’s half deck and half void. The walls of this light well are glazed in both louvres and plate glass and it forms the courtyard heart of a doughnut plan, flanked to the north by the living areas – facing up the hill towards the road – and to the south by a row of bedrooms strung across the back. Thin catwalk balconies run along the fully glazed façades of both edges, rising alarmingly high as the gully drops away below. The whole platform touches the ground only at the north-east corner.
Before the recent heritage works, the house was weathered and worn by nearly six-and-a-half decades of constant occupation. Tales of its dilapidation are hair-raising – rusted chicken wire and safety tape the only things stopping people falling off the precipitous back balcony. The original kitchen and bathroom fit-outs were long gone, but miraculously the whole hadn’t been ruined with unsympathetic additions, nor bowled over for its land value. The trickiness of the site helped that, as did the state heritage listing in 2016 – protecting it from the fate of so many other mid-century houses. But what really saved it is the new owners, Jamie and Marika, who bought it knowing it would need to be expensively rescued. They now live there with their three sons.
In describing the work of heritage restoration, the word “loving” tends to be overused. But it’s hard to think of another that fits here – diligent? Assiduous? Neither is quite right – especially given architect Peter Lonergan’s longstanding role as posthumous curator of the Lucas legacy since Bill’s death in 2001. Further, in a pleasing historical twist, two of the Lucas sons – both builders – were integrally involved with the restoration work.
It was a process of close, patient attention: to dismantle and clean, do the “tap test” to check for rot, and ultimately to repair, replace or reinstate every element of the building, including retrieving parts of otherwise decayed timbers and splicing them in elsewhere. Lonergan describes it as pulling the building apart in order to put it back together, tightening up a structure that had, over the decades, become alarmingly slack.
Today the restored building is as crisp as a minted banknote. You can still feel vibration as people move elsewhere in the house, but the structure is taut and springy. The new roof and floor and replaced glass walls have improved the environmental performance. It sports a modest new kitchen. There are changes that might have purists tutting, even though it’s all reversible: the north-western corner bay, previously a covered deck, is now enclosed as an internal lounge, and the main bedroom is more private – the original bedrooms had no doors, only curtains. But on the whole the heritage work has kept a family home alive, being true to the spirit of the original without being slavish. Tellingly, building elements that needed replacing weren’t swapped with period 1950s parts. Instead they were replaced with the cheapest equivalent available off the shelf now – using the same system as the original architect-builder but contemporary.
There are many satisfying things in this house: the lucidity and modesty of the plan, the frugality of the structure, the kit-of-parts construction system, the cool impersonality of the aesthetic, the direct, resourceful pragmatism of an owner-builder working cheap and handmade. It’s unfussy and decidedly more warm and homey than all that glass might infer. With louvres to modulate breeze and temperature, it’s also not the sealed greenhouse box that so tormented Edith Farnsworth. The living areas, despite being remarkably present to the street, feel secluded by the surrounding garden and trees. Overall it remains convincing as a house: modest, unconventional, slightly hair-raising in its structural precarity, cold when it’s cold and hot when it’s hot, but also liveable and workable to this day.
There are also more dreamy, affective enchantments in an architecture that takes a perimeter strip of domesticity, wraps it in glass and floats it up into the treetops among the birds to catch the shifting shadows of foliage and cloud, to follow the sun as it tracks its diurnal and seasonal paths. The Glass House is a highwire act, a building that asks you to hold your nerve, that’s right on the edge of the possible. It’s also a vision of how to live in the landscape, an idea about the possibilities of dwelling, a house proffering a particular way of being at home in the world.
ARTS DIARY
EXHIBITION Lindy Lee
National Gallery of Australia, Ngambri/Canberra, until June 1, 2025
OPERA Chorus!
Geelong Arts Centre, Wadawurrung Country, November 13 and 15
THEATRE August: Osage County
Belvoir St Theatre, Gadigal Country/Sydney, until December 15
CINEMA Melbourne Queer Film Festival
Cinemas throughout Naarm/Melbourne, November 15-24
MULTIMEDIA James Barth: The Clumped Spirit
Institute of Modern Art, Meanjin/Brisbane, until December 22
LAST CHANCE
VISUAL ART Bridget Currie – each one a world
Carrick Hill House Museum, Kaurna Yarta/Springfield, South Australia, until November 10
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 9, 2024 as "Glass works".
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