This extension is attached to an Edwardian weatherboard house in Brunswick, Melbourne. The locality is mixed-use, and is in a transitional phase from light industry to residential apartments. The house extension is two-storey, yielding 48 sq.m floor area. The ground floor comprises a passage, a bathroom and toilet. A narrow stair leads to a large upstairs studio with a north-facing balcony window.
The owners wished to retain the existing kitchen and avoid the usual approach of opening up this part of the house to the rear, so the Milk Carton is located on the east side of the house.
Construction comprises a stained concrete slab, pine framing, bamboo first floor on finger-jointed pine joists, and pine stud frame and steel roof structure. Plasterboard throughout. Insulation combinations achieve R6.0 at roof and R3.0 to external walls. Cladding is flat factory-painted steel on 15mm plywood on walls and roof. Windows and doors are double-glazed aluminium, powder coated black. Sun shades are galvanized steel, painted.
The decision to shape the extension in the form of a milk carton came from the architect, and was enthusiastically received by the owners Neil and Jenny because they favour explorative ideas. The architect’s desire to include the graphics was welcomed also, and Neil took on the role of editing and adapting these from the selected carton.
The milk carton concept was not primarily a response to site and context, although they provided a suitable opportunity for the idea. The strategy of shaping buildings to resemble food packages is a long-term preoccupation of the architect, and is predicated on Pop Art precedents such as the work of Claes Oldenberg.
This extension is a piece of 'fiction architecture' where the owners and visitors pretend to inhabit a huge milk carton (or have they shrunk?) The shift in scale prompts a reconsideration of the graphics and wording of a familiar object. Are we entirelly comfortable with the word 'pure'? Is the whiteness of the contents necessarily an indication of superiority? Is the term 'low fat' only an indication of possible good health, or is there an implication that slimness is morally superior to fatness? And is 'homogenised' necessarily a good thing, both in milk production and for society as a whole?
The extension was built very carefully by Craig Jones and his team at Integrated Construction Services. The architect in our office who was responsible for taking the concept through to completion was Clara Friedhoff.
The owners found a suitable signwriter,and they even found milk-drop light fittings, and designed spilt-milk landscaping!
