Events: Kevin McCloud, a reminder

A reminder, for those of you who don't have your tickets yet (and many of you do, we know), that HOME New Zealand is delighted to be part of the team bringing Grand Designs host Kevin McCloud to New Zealand to do a lecture at The Civic in Auckland on Wednesday October 26, 2011. Tickets are on sale via The Edge at the link here.



We like: David Hockney's iPad show

One of the best things about our recent visit to Copenhagen was seeing David Hockney's show of his drawings on the iPad and iPhone at the Lousiana Museum of Modern Art (which is about 30 minutes by train north of the Danish capital). In a darkened room, a wall was lined with iPads showing slideshows of Hockney's sketches - all of them small observational moments with an incredibly charming naive quality to them.

Hockney began using the 'Brushes' application on his iPhone in 2008 and drawing by making strokes with his fingers. More recently, he has been using a stylus on his iPad. He says one of the things he likes about these drawings is the questions they raise abott authenticity and reproduction: he emails drawings to his friends which are, as he says, not copies of the original works, but identical to them in every way.

His commentary accompanying the exhibition also makes the point that, in this context at least, the iPad is a magical medium, lending a luminous quality to these beautiful drawings that pen and ink could never emulate. There is also a pleasing showbizzy sort of touch to the exhibition, with the animated playbacks of some of the drawings being created projected onto one of the gallery walls.

You can read more about the exhibition at the Louisana Museum of Modern Art site here. The drawings below are on display on the site.   



Outtakes: The Kare Kare house, our Home of the Year 2011 by Michael O'Sullivan

From the black sand of Kare Kare beach, the HOME New Zealand magazine Home of the Year 2011 is almost invisible. The house was designed by Michael O'Sullivan of Bull O'Sullivan Architects for Bob and Barbara Harvey. It's a pleasure for us to be able to show you some outtakes from Patrick Reynolds' beautiful shoot of the house here. In the shot below, you can just see the house nestled among the trees in the lower right-hand corner of the frame.

Inside, the house faces south towards the beach, but draws light in from a sheltered north-facing courtyard and from glass panels on the roof. The weatherboard ceiling appears to fragment and fall away as it nears the home's southern wall, giving way to the glass panels overhead. 

The ceiling tilts towards a band of windows that frame the view towards the beach into a horiztonal slot. Holes for lightbulb recesses are punched into the ceiling.

Outside in the courtyard, the ceiling plane appears to erode again to admit as much sunlight as possible into the space.

The main bedroom (the 129-square-metre house has two bedrooms in total) features orange carpet and windows wrapping the ceiling and wall at the northern end of the room. The door at left leads to the courtyard.

This view from outside the house is about all that can be seen of it from the road. It shows the main bedroom volume (clad in black bituminous roofing membrane) cantilevered over the carport.  



We'll post more outtakes of the finalists in the 2011 Home of the Year here on the blog in the coming days. Thanks again to our Home of the Year partner Altherm Window Systems for their ongoing support of New Zealand's richest architectural prize.