Courtyard Houses 1: Hill St House by Roy Grounds

The first in a series of many precedent posts. I've been interested in the courtyard house as a way of engaging with the idea of the house as a 'sancturary'. Maybe I'm taking the word to mean 'citadel', but I think there's something appropriate about having a well defined envelope that more intimate spaces are then carved out of, perhaps as a strategy for resisting the harsh environment beyond.

I've also been thinking a lot about Lily's art, particularly the frequent use of primitive geometries like circles and cubes. Grounds combines both these ideas, the citadel and primitive geometries, but with a delicate, almost Japanese quality of space.

Images: Roy Grounds, Hill St House, South Yarra, 1954