Set within the gently folding contours of the Bulga plateau (meaning 'big mountain' in the Biripi language). As a place to immerse, slow, and dovetailing ritual with the rhythms of the land, Magenta Outhouse floats among the long wavering grasses.
Addressing the terroir of the site, and situated at 31.6 degrees south within a big landscape, the architecture provides a platform to distill the human experience. This is as much a cultural construct as it is an architectural form, as much a symbol of a certain way of life as it is a marker of the human relationship to place.
The elemental form reveals itself as you weave your path around the outcrop of remnant sub-tropical rainforest, a natural bowl in the landscape that informed the project. Its intimate siting emerging. Anchored by the naturally existing basalt boulders, a platform delicately coalesces with the moss and lichen, leading you across the deck, pausing as you step across a boulder and into the bath.
Conceptually evolving as a primal response to rituals within a landscape, and considered not to impose, the project carefully balances the natural elements of the landscape with the human rituals it shares. Connecting this experience, the elegant strokes of the winged roof express a structural cohesion, as the folded steel sheet extend its gesture as a canopy, softly intersecting and floating above the soft rolling hills.
This structural steel forms a spinal structure, utilising recycled steel members existing from the property, and local community fabricators to collaborate on the project's construction. Timber elements are locally milled endemic Blackbutt. The rhythm of the steel spine lightly rests over paired steel angle columns — these columns not only provide the structural roof support, but precisely envelope the cladding junctions.
The theatre of the form glistens as you draw near, exploring the ethereal beauty of light, space and shadow. A gesture of translucent magenta sheets frame the enclosure of the private space. Designed utilising full sheets, and moderating as a light box, the glowing reflections and ever-changing hues cast across the panels expressing the passing of time. These paths of the sun and moon dance light and shadows both within, and across the form, playing with, and embodying true Vitruvian delight.
Effortlessly restrained and intent, Magenta Outhouse shares as a reminder to pause, breathe, observe and immerse.
Team:
Architects: Atelier Marks Gaal
Directors: Joshua Marks · Emma Gaal
Fabrication: Local community metalworkers
Ceramics: Georgia Stevenson Ceramics
Photographer: Alex Brunton
