The Moebius House and the Tide House, Sydney, Australia

Experimental harbourside houses connect to the surrounding landscape
Tony Owen NDM Architects have just had 2 challenging Sydney Houses approved on the harbourfront. The Moebius House and the Tide House both explore a supple and responsive approach to environmental design and respond to the unique landcsape around Sydney Harbour.

The Tide House is located on the waterfront at Castlecrag. It takes a series of white boxes and distorts them in response to site and view potential as well as programmatic issues. The client wanted a simple clean house, but he wanted to maximise the outlook. The result of these movements on the simple volumes creates the ripple effect.

The second house, Moebius house faces onto views of the Opera House and Harbour Bridge. The architects responded to the site with a series of movements which folded and twisted the space in order to maximise the changes of level, view opportunities and potential for connectivity to outside spaces at various ground planes. The house has a fluidity of space which is a direct result of having a strong relationship with the surrounding landscape. Both houses represent a fluid response to design that Tony Owen NDM Architects call ‘elastic architecture’. They describe such architecture as being pliant, with an inherent structure and ordering principle. It is an architecture that is capable of responding to all manner of changing variables and which expand to allow greater connectivity to the exterior environment to maximise light, air and movement flows, or retract for greater privacy and differentiation of uses.


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