Glassbook House
Beverly Zielonko
Text description provided by the architects. What does it mean to be at home? The home, for the client of the Glassbook House, is a place to retreat from the outside world. This hideaway, to the rear of a Federation-style house in Tempe, Sydney, explores the home as a sanctuary that revolves around a serious collection of books.
The individual act of reading structures the two-storey addition to this home. Communal activities - eating, cooking and entertaining - are flanked by a two-storey bookcase. You can pull out a book anywhere and anytime.
Daylight filters through the southern glassblock facade deep into the interior. In Tempe, it also provides acoustic solace from the nearby Princes Highway, and planes passing overhead. A feature window, which frames a reading nook, punctures through the glass block facade to provide views of neighbouring rooftops and gardens. The backyard below has a permeable boundary that connects to the adjacent property. The home is not only a place for intimacy alone but also with neighbours.
The details of the existing house, including decorative moldings, are amplified with careful and minimal intervention. This is carried through to a new bathroom converted from a second bedroom where partitions and joinery respect original decorative elements. The glass block edition at the rear adds continuity to the celebration of detail being read throughout the home.
The client engaged Sibling Architecture to design a two-storey addition to her Federation era cottage in Tempe, that would accomodate her impressive library. Enter this eye-catching contemporary home extension inspired by the Maison de Verre in Paris, where every design decision has been made with reading in mind!
Sibling Architecture has made a name for themselves with their innovative, conceptual and often playful approach to architecture. Their projects often go beyond aesthetic design, demonstrating a social and cultural conscience, and the Glassbook House in the Sydney suburb of Tempe is no different.
The result is an inversion of traditional open-plan living, using mezzanine levels, open stairwells and steel mesh flooring to connect the spaces vertically. Qianyi credits Japanese residential architecture with the inspiration for this innovation, citing the way it utilises split levels to divide spaces as a key influence. These staggered platforms house multiple reading nooks, which are designed to take advantage of different aspects that maximise natural sunlight throughout the day.
Not only does the striking glass block facade provide perfectly filtered light and a distinctive exterior feature, it creates an acoustic buffer between the domestic space and the flight path overhead. The block is situated just next to Sydney airport, so this added layer of protection was an absolute necessity in creating a library-like sanctuary.
Single pane glass doors act like pages, opening the kitchen and dining space out onto the paved back yard. Opening these floor-to-ceiling doors is a little like cracking the spine of a new novel. This house is an open book!
This book is a late 18th century full leather volume sewn on cords. The front board is detached and the back board is held on with cords. The spine is damaged. The volume is housed in a slipcase that is too small and is causing damage. Conservators will re-back the volume in leather re-attaching the front board. A double-tray box will be created to house this fragile volume.
The official site of Laura Resau, award-winning author of novels for older children and teens. Her multi-cultural books touch on issues of immigration, indigenous rights, refugees, international travel, adventure, mystery, love, friendship, and social justice. She is also an experienced bilingual speaker and workshop leader, and enjoys presenting at schools, libraries, and festivals. She currently resides in Colorado, but has lived in Mexico and France, and travels internationally as often as possible. She has a background in ESL-teaching and cultural anthropology, with a focus on indigenous communities in Latin America.
Sophie's adventures on her road trip were inspired by things that happened to me when I lived in Oaxaca and traveled around southern Mexico and Central America: watching the sunset with a cop, seeing a parade trampling through street art in Huajuapan, taking buses alone to Guatemala and crossing that creepy border, getting into sticky situations and being saved by kind strangers I met on buses, having spiritual cleanings with indigenous healers, discovering an ancient seemingly-dead-but-full-of-life Mixtec woman on the roadside, encountering teenage boy soldiers wielding machine guns and whistling at me, walking down a path in a forest hiding landmines, spending some surreal time in a small-town hospital with large breast sculptures on the walls, being called guera (white girl) or gringa fifty times a day, singing along to Stairway to Heaven with non-English speakers who had the lyrics memorized (in the oddest of circumstances)... and I could go on and on...
In my mid-twenties, I befriended a Guatemalan man and a Bosnian woman, both refugees, both wonderful, warm people. As our friendship deepened, they shared with me glimpses of the violence they'd been through. The trauma had affected them physically and emotionally, yet they managed to overcome it by connecting with people and finding joy in small things-like the reflection of sunshine on pool water or the pattern of grain in a mesquite coffee table.
One day, my Guatemalan friend told me, "After the violencia, Laurita, I decided to let my heart fill with love, so there would be no room for anger. The people from my country who let their hearts fill with anger became sicoptico." I'd never heard the word sicoptico before, and I wondered about the definition. Later that day, alone in my house, I realized with a sudden chill what it meant. Psychopathic. My friend had chosen to be a kind human being, not a psychopath.
We all encounter traumas, some more devastating than others. I wondered if there comes a time when we have to make a choice: will we let our hearts fill with bitterness, anger, sadness, or will we fill our hearts with light and love?
In my mid-twenties, I tutored a wonderful Bosnian woman who had an amazing zest for life, who defied any stereotype I'd encountered of a trauma-stricken refugee. We cried together as she told me her house in Bosnia was now "kaput"; we giggled together as she told me the groserias (bad words) she'd learned from her Mexican co-workers at the factory; we smiled together as we sipped delicious, thick coffee on her porch; we grumbled together as we waded through red tape for her daughter's visa; we laughed together as she recounted her escapades with her Mexican friend teaching her to drive. (Somewhere in there I taught her a little English, too ) Once, I came early to our session, and saw her lying on a lounge chair by the dazzling turquoise pool, her tan skin soaking up the sunshine, eyes closed, face to the bright blue sky, a faint Buddha smile lighting up her face. I stood there, deeply touched, and tried to feel how the world felt to her.
Although Sophie is not a refugee with a traumatic past, she has plenty of struggles-deep insecurities and anxieties and panic attacks that she realizes could prevent her from really living her life. I dealt with similar issues in my teens and early twenties (well, okay, I still do, but not as bad ), and like Sophie, I found that opening myself up to new people and places and ideas gave me perspective on my own problems. And this gave me the power to change-to decide to live an adventurous, joyful life instead of a closed-up life of fear.
Red Glass is about making connections with people who, on the surface, seem vastly different from you. I remember that in middle and high school, it wasn't easy to form friendships or romances with people outside of your social circle. I've noticed, though, that some of the most fascinating and meaningful relationships happen when you break the boundaries and forge a bond with someone very different from you. You may find that you have a connection on a much deeper level - and those are the best kind. In Red Glass, Sophie and ngel discover that despite very different backgrounds, they are essential to each other on their journeys of healing.
Like my first book, Red Glass also deals with emotional issues faced by Mexican immigrants trying to create better lives for themselves and their children. When I lived in Tucson, about an hour from the border, I regularly read newspaper articles about immigrants dying from heat exhaustion or dehydration or exposure in the Sonoran desert on their journeys. Like Sophie, I often went hiking in the oven of a desert, and imagined how immigrants felt as they made their journeys.
Here in Fort Collins, I work with immigrants and have many friends who made the dangerous trip across the desert. When they go back to Mexico to visit their families, and then, a few months later, make the trip across the desert, I worry terribly about them. When they tell me about their brothers and sisters and children crossing over, I worry terribly with them. One thing about being a person prone to anxiety and panic attacks is that I'm very good at imagining dying. This tendency has felt like a burden most of my life, but in the realm of writing books and empathizing with others, I think it is a blessing. I drew on these feelings to create the character of Pablo, and to get inside Sophie's character as she bonds with Pablo.
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