Blok Belongil – Blok Modular x Vokes and Peters

Our client purchased the triangular shaped site, located between a public beach car park, a train line, and a busy neighbourhood feeder road, but blessed with panoramic views of the Pacific Ocean, the hinterland mountains, and Point Byron. The site sits at the end of a dense subdivision of suburban lots, in a council coastal erosion zone which requires all construction to be modular and fully relocatable if erosion reaches within 50m of the house. Our clients described a project which needed to accommodate their dogs, who had replaced their young adult children who would come to stay with friends.

The house was fully prefabricated in our Brisbane factory as 6 volumetric modules, transported to the site on trucks and installed in one day by a local builder. We found that thinking critically about the appropriate building typology allowed us to overcome the shortcomings of a suburban house plan organisation as a place for extended social gatherings of extended family and friends. A boutique hotel as a project ambition helped direct our thinking towards a compound building with a series of connected but discreet parts, both internal and external, roofed and unroofed.

Off-site (prefab) construction takes the negative environmental impacts normally associated with traditional in-situ construction (like pollution, noise, traffic, waste etc.) and takes them into a controlled factory environment designed to mitigate or overcome them. This also optimises efficiency, allowing accurate cost control, reducing construction time by about 50%, eliminating the impacts of weather, and allowing a higher level of precision and build quality. We see this as the future of the construction industry. The design reflects a societal shift toward more agile housing which better accommodates multi-generational living, ageing in place, short term accommodation, de-institutionalised care, and shared tenure models.

The planning concept consciously avoids a typical suburban nuclear-family house floor plan characterized by bedrooms and bathrooms arranged along corridors. Contrary to the typical suburban response to defend territory with fences and edit the less desirable aspects of a site by generating a bias in the site plan, we imagined that this dune site sat in a broader, unblemished and infinite natural wilderness. We used statutory setbacks to generate a triangular plan at the centre of the site. The absence of fences allows one to imagine the ground plane of the site continuing to the horizon (extreme Shakkei - Japanese borrowed scenery). The plan is hollowed out to hold a remnant of the dune at its centre. It is a compound building defended at its external walls like a ship washed up on the dunes, which pulls the surrounding landscape into its centre. The house is small but spatially and experientially generous - one can locate themselves in relation to the edge of the building – moving from an immersion in the coastal landscape, to connect to the street life in the kitchen. You can retreat from the edge but still with a view of the sky and dunes next to you.