If you believe the architect Ian MacDonald, his buildings come straight out of the ground.
“Each place has its own qualities you can work with,” he says. “Each project comes down to the architectural idea, and where that comes from is the place. The site gives that to you.”
Many architects use phrases like this, but with MacDonald they're both apt and completely inadequate. Over 25 years of work, he's made a reputation with buildings that respond to their sites but in very surprising ways.
His own house in Wychwood Park is the best example.
Starting with the small footprint of an existing house, he carved down into the earth to add below-ground space, and also a remarkable sunken courtyard tucked into a hillside.
His design doesn't just respond to the landscape; it reshapes it.
For a recent project near High Park, MacDonald took a similarly bold approach to a building and a piece of earth. His task was to renovate a two-storey Georgian-style house for a couple of empty nesters, Georg and Petra Unger, opening it up and modernizing it. He carved away the back facade – and much of the front as well, making a striking composition of broad windowpanes in sapele wood frames.
This sounds conventional, but two factors make the house unusual. One is the location on Ellis Park Road, which snakes along a hillside facing High Park. There is a fair amount of traffic out front, along with incredible vistas of the treetops. In the backyard is a very steep slope lined with ancient pines, with a neighbouring house tucked into the woods. During the 30 years they'd lived here, the Ungers, German expatriates who run a high-end woodworking company, had always wanted more of a connection with the forest – yet without the neighbours seeing too much. “We always planned to open up the back and have lots of glass, but we hadn't figured out how,” Petra Unger says. They hired Macdonald “because we admired Ian's sensitivity to the surroundings,” she adds. “And Ian figured it out.”
He did, with flair. Macdonald and architect Jeremy Campbell extended the Ungers' living space upward and back with a pair of additions, taking the house to 2,700 square feet. Within, they designed a collection of rooms that perform a complex, lovely dance upward into the trees. You climb from the street to the glass front wall and an unceremonious front entrance; you walk in, and wind to the left around a monolith of cherrywood cabinets to see a hearth and custom dining table. From there, it's up a staircase located at the back of the house – or rather just inside, separated from the glass-and-wood rear facade by a grid of structural steel. An office and three bedrooms, for them, their grown daughter and guests, fill the second and third floors. They are enhanced by a succession of perfectly framed views – to the front of the house, High Park stretching to the horizon; in the back, the hillside and trees.
In this way, the Ungars get the close connection with nature that modernist houses have always aspired to, without giving up their privacy. Petra explains that they will happily sit in the dining room, half-hidden from the street, and peek down at the street. “People will walk up to the house and say, ‘You're on display here.' But we're not; they are on display!”
