Castlecrag is an affluent suburb on Sydney’s lower North Shore with an abundance of bushy vistas and water views. The other thing Castlecrag has in abundance is architectural heritage, and the foundation of that heritage was laid by Walter Burley Griffin (WBG), the suburb’s American planner, early in the 20th century.

Griffin’s Guy House (Source: Walter Burley Griffin Society) . . .
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WBG’s bold experiments in living
The 15 houses that Griffin completed in the northern peninsula suburb (>30 more remained on the drawing board) are low-rise dwellings constructed in concrete, sandstone or brick, mainly locally sourced. Most of the houses are modest dwellings, small and squat, and for the most part the exteriors could be said to be aesthetically challengeda⃞. WBG’s credo was “designing for nature”, his enunciated goal—subordinating the Castlecrag houses to the surrounding landscape thus preserving the natural features—was realised…WBG left a legacy that inspired the projects of later architects in Castlecrag, notwithstanding that much of post-war Castlecrag housing development has not however been sympathetic with the Griffins’ architectural vision (‘Sydney — Castlecrag’, Walter Burley Griffin Society, www.griffinsociety.org).

Glass House (Source: Sydney Living Museums)

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The Glass House
Two architects drawn to Castlecrag in the 1950s to create Modernist residential buildings that are both innovative and in synch with the bush environment are Bill Lucas and Peter Muller. Lucas, a WWII veteran, with his wife Ruth, also an architect (cf. Walter and Marion Griffin) designed the “Glass House”…built in 1957 by Bill and his brother Nev and a friend and financed by Bill’s war service loan. The Glass House is like no other dwelling in Castlecrag, open plan in design, all four walls are of glass and thus the house is open to the landscape on all sides. The Lucas House (which was constructed as the Lucas family home and a studio for Bill’s practice) has been lauded for its economical design, providing the bare essentials while maintaining its sustainability…its “featherweight structure float(ing) miraculously about the tree canopy”b⃞ (with rocks and creek below) (‘Revisited: ‘Glass House by Bill and Ruth Lucas’, Peter Longeran, Architecture Australia, 17-Aug-2022, www.architectureau.com). The Glass House has been described as an “excellent seminal example of the shelter-in-nature minimalist composition constructed in Northern Sydney post World War II by architects of the ‘Sydney School’” (’Aus_Modern_House_Lucas_GL’, Docomomo International, 2003, www.docomomoaustralia.com.au).

The radical Glass House was a reaction by the Lucases to WBG’s restrictive covenants and building controls in force in Castlecrag. WGB’s covenant forbid housing construction in materials other than stone, concrete or brick, but the all-glass Lucas House somehow circumvented the stringent building restrictionsc⃞.

Lucas House,
80 The Bulwark
Castlecrag, NSW

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Audette House

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Audette House
Muller’s House (built for an American client in 1952) was the 24-year-old rookie architect’s first completed commission. Intended as an American colonial house, however Muller won the client over to something more Antipodean, devising a technique for the walls which became known as “snotted brick” – mortar oozing out the grout lines between the bricks (‘Striking a chord: Peter Muller on Audette House and why architecture is like music’, Architecture and Design, 17-Sep-2014, www.architectureanddesign.com.au. Muller drew on his recent experience studying in the US for his project which bears the strong influence of Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic ‘Fallingwater’ and Muller’s liking for traditional Japanese motifs in residential architecture.

Audette House
265-267 Edinburgh Rd
Castlecrag NSW

Gowing House [Gruzman] (Photo: Max Dupain)
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Sydney School v International School: “Nature-responsive” v purist “white painted walls” Lucas and Muller were part of a loosely-connected group of Australian architects in the mid-20th century labelled the “Sydney School”. The group rejected the prevailing trend in architecture, the International School of Le Corbusier, Gropius and Van Der Rohe (whitewashed masonry, steel framed glass houses) as unsuitable in an Australian context. Sydney School architects, influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright‘s organic (“natural”) principles for designing houses, and WBG’s Castlecrag project which was visually sensitive to the natural bushland, “displayed distinctive choices that were driven by the natural environment and employed simple, ‘minimally processed’, low-cost materials”. ‘Sydney School, the virtuous case of Australian modernism’, Tommaso Picciioli, Domus, 27-Mar-2020, www.domusweb.it. The School was sometimes referred to as the “Nuts and Berries” Style for its preference for rustic materials (stone, brick, timber).

Buhrich House II (Photo: Eric Sierins 2000)

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Footnote: Modernist Castlecrag
Castlecrag architecture is interesting in that it contains examples of both of these rival Modernist styles. In addition to Lucas and Muller, many of the leading local architects of the second half of the 20th century (quite a number of them émigrés from Nazism) including Neville Gruzman, Harry Seidler, Hugh Buhrich and Andre Porebski, contributed to the residential profile of the suburb. The variety of architecture sitting under the umbrella of Modernism can be seen in houses as different as Gruzman‘s ”organic” monolithic Gowing House (8 The Bulwark) (1969) and the two Hugh Buhrich family homes, 315 and 375 Edinburgh Road (No. I constructed 1940s, No. II constructed 1968-72)d⃞. Both Buhrich Houses are in the European Bauhaus style, the later one rated by architect Peter Myers as “the finest modern house in Australia“, and an example of Brutalist domestic architecture (‘Brutalist Architecture in Sydney’, Sydney Morning Herald, 29-Sep-2017, www.smh.com.au). Architect and urban designer Glenn Harper extends the Brutalist tag to include the Lucas Glass House, despite Lucas eschewing the use of one of Brutalist architecture‘s key materials, raw concrete, in his Glass House (”How the ‘Sydney School’ changed postwar Australian architecture”, Davina Jackson, The Conversation, 28-Jun-2019, www.theconversation.com).

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a⃞ with the exceptions of Fishwick House and Grant House

b⃞ the house has been described as being “barely there” (www.archinform.net)

c⃞ one explanation is that the construction being engulfed in dense bush was overlooked by Willoughby Council (Longeran)

d⃞ Buhrich also designed the Duval House at 2 The Tor Walk

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