This project is located in a small village on Mornington Peninsula, approximately one hour in a car from Melbourne, Australia. The site is gently sloping towards the gravel road and looks over the valley in which there are vineyards and rural buildings. The client is an established artist, and the brief was to design a small studio for his work with additional space for his family to live.
Humbug is the residue of a dialogue between the architect, Sam Kebbell, and the painter, Peter Adsett. Humbug is both a process and a thing. We set out to investigate the space between painting and architecture. The intention was not to apply paint pictorially but rather to think ‘in painting’ as a disciplinary structure while making architecture and, conversely, to bring architectural thinking to the ‘construction of painting’. The connection we pursued was not any representational device common to both; but rather the experience of space and surface through respective notions of figure and ground.
