Title: Andresen O’Gorman
ISBN:
Pages: 160
Format: 210 x 280 mm Softcover
Price: AUS $70

Text by Michael Keniger, Philip Goad and Brit Andresen
Photographs by Patrick Bingham-Hall

"Brit Andresen and Peter O'Gorman take their architecture very seriously. Each house they design is a piece of detailed research - a laboratory for three things: refining the use of Australian hardwood as a building material; the use of mathematical proportions and harmonic series as ordering devices; and the constant search for an appropriate creation and definition of place. Binding it all is the notion of a poetics of construction, and of finding the right atmosphere or evocation for their site and their client."

To live in a house by Andresen O’Gorman is to live in a magical timber frame, half inside and half out, continually dappled with striated shade. Their houses demonstrate the dextrous layering of screens and battens, with the expressed timber construction typical of the traditional Queensland house. But the use of studied proportions, carefully orchestrated visual axes and adjustable transparency suggest that Andresen O’Gorman have provided a new way of sub-tropical living. Their belief in the aesthetic pleasure of an exposed timber frame is blended with a constant interest in placemaking. The result is a poetry of construction consonant with a poetry of dwelling.

The houses of Andresen O’Gorman are located in and around Brisbane, in sub-tropical South East Queensland. The houses have been designed and built over a twenty year period since 1984, and they have become internationally recognized for their conceptual rigour, their structural dexterity and their aesthetic delight. The architecture has been remarkably influential within Australia and in South East Asia, and their houses now symbolize the joys of a sub-tropical lifestyle.

Brit Andresen received the RAIA Gold Medal (Australia's top architecture prize) in 2002, the year after the death of her long-term partner Peter O'Gorman. The jury cited her outstanding achievements as an architect and educator over a sustained period in Australia and overseas... "She has an international profile, and has designed and built, in collaboration with her late husband Peter O’Gorman, some exquisite architectural projects of high quality and rich response."

The lavishly illustrated monograph surveys the significant houses of Andresen O'Gorman, with extensively detailed photography by Patrick Bingham-Hall and documented by the architects’ original drawings. Essays are written by Michael Keniger, Philip Goad and Brit Andresen.