On Scale and Generosity

Images, Alex Baxter
Words, Colin Baillie.

There’s something satisfyingly simple about small buildings. Stripping things back to the essentials gives everything that remains a heightened significance. The details, the materials, and the light become the project.

Earlier this year we completed our own small house, Iorram. The project was an opportunity for us to hone an approach to craft, and to work in a direct and simple way with local timber - a mode of practising that has become embedded in our studio’s ethos. We wanted to make a building that’s spare, and economic in its bones, but rich in material character. Just four apertures puncture the monolithic clay block walls, each serving a particular purpose. This is an environment in which turning inward, and sheltering behind deep walls, and a big roof, is as important as connecting to views and the wider landscape. We made the house in clay block because it’s a simple, and essential way of building, as direct as any ancient vernacular. Their fabrication is tethered to technology, but their assembly and use of one single material is intrinsically low-tech and pure. Unfired clay on the inside, lime harling on the outside, and nothing but clay, and pockets of insulating air between.

Considering the notion of building small, it’s also important to register the difference between size, and generosity. Small structures can be generous spatially, using volume and pulling the outside in. There’s a certain intimacy with materials and construction in a well-proportioned small room, that lends a sense of comfort and containment. We’ve learned a lot from building Iorram. Particularly, ways we might simplify construction in an increasingly technocentric building culture, and about balancing a certain frugality in means, against a sense of warmth and generosity.