John Denton: In heaven and earth

Wish Magazine, The Australian

5 April 2012

The firm John Denton formed in 1972 with Bill Corker and Barrie Marshall has been a pacesetter for Australian architecture at home and a flagbearer abroad.

The road to Melbourne's wine country loops down from Christmas Hills towards a valley of parched, late summer pasture and vineyards in full leaf. In the middle distance rises a conical hill cloaked in vines and there, at its stony apex, is the house that John Denton built for himself.

A building formed from two long narrow rectangular tubes, one laid atop the other at right angles so that it cantilevers precariously over the hillside. It's a sculptural form of great confidence and more than a little oomph. In fact, there are two separate visual dramas played out here: one of picturesque landscape, the other of hard-edged contemporary architecture. And they work, quite beautifully, together.

Dressed in a blue-black shirt over dark trousers and boots scuffed with just enough dirt to suggest a credible amount of manual labour, Denton greets me with an open smile. From a distance his house seems to crown the hill on which it stands, but it's only after stepping onto the property that I get sense of the building's true orientation: it is built not on the peak but into it, slicing about 60 degrees from the full panorama. Though protected on one side by a rocky slope it's pretty exposed up here and a dry northerly breeze tugs at the architect's grey hair, worn at a mid-'60s Easy Beats length. Denton seems relaxed and at ease as he invites me inside the most personal structure of his flourishing, 40-year-long career.

The firm John Denton formed in 1972 with Bill Corker and Barrie Marshall has been a pacesetter for Australian architecture at home - inner Melbourne, in particular, bears the Denton Corker Marshall stamp - and a flag-bearer abroad. Its reach extends from Asia, where key projects include Singapore's new $1 billion Asia Square commercial and retail development, as well as Australian embassies in Beijing, Tokyo and most recently Jakarta, all the way to the UK. In fact, DCM does about 70 per cent of its work overseas. On the day we meet Denton is able to announce, with an air more of relief than satisfaction, that construction has finally begun after a decade-long delay at the DCM-designed Stonehenge Visitors Centre.

It took Denton, best known member of the trio, an eternity to build his own home. "Architects design houses for themselves free of a lot of constraints because they can make all sorts of decisions for themselves," he offers as an explanation for his tardiness. "But they're also affected, particularly if they're younger architects, by whether what they're going to do is likely to date, go out of fashion or overly define them. And then they're stuck." He cites the American Michael Graves and Canadian Frank Gehry as architects so sharply defined by the 1980s postmodern aesthetic that they were unable to wrestle free of it.

"If you set yourself on a particular visual position - Gehry, for example, is known for one thing - then you're set and it can be very hard to change; it can be very difficult later in your career." Denton has been constrained all these years by the not unreasonable fear of being imprisoned professionally by his most intimate architectural creation: his self-built rural retreat. But there came a time when he felt, he says with a laugh, he'd "been around long enough to finally do a house for myself".

Over coffee, which he makes from a hissing espresso machine set into a niche in the kitchen and serves on a long table of recycled eucalyptus burnt tar-black, he explains how his house, which took three years to design and build, "grew" out of the vineyard. The vineyard, in turn, grew from the idea - or dream - of the house. "When I found this piece of land in 1996, on which I initially planted 17ha of vines, I thought the top of the hill was a fabulous place for a house," he says in a soft yet firm and resonant voice; the voice of a man who feels no need to strive or strain for attention. "In fact someone a long time ago seemed to have the same idea because there was a little avenue of hawthorne trees running up to the top of the hill. So we designed the vineyards around a house location, and later designed the house around the vineyard."

Until 12 months ago, when the house was completed, Denton lived in a Flinders Lane apartment. The weekends are now spent, whenever possible, in this light-filled modernist eyrie. The design elements are strong and simple, and the mood tranquil. "We [he and his wife of 36 years] wanted to make it different from the place in town, which is noisy and chaotic, especially on Friday and Saturday nights," Denton says. "This is our serene and meditative getaway. Our sanctuary."

A retreat it may be, but the five-bedroom home with a fold-down bed in the upstairs study and a lounge room furnished with spacious sofas finished in grey merino wool, is designed for company. The southwestern end was conceived with Denton's restaurateur son Simon and family in mind. "We're always happy for people to call in or come," he says. It's not hard to imagine the place viewed from a dark country road at night, lit up like a bar of gold in the blue-black sky; and inside the wine and the conversation flowing.

Denton's passion for the grape unlocks another corner of his personality. A genial man, he's fond of the wine, food and good company. The new home has introduced another simple pleasure to his repertoire: "cloud gazing". On a short stroll to the rocky elevation behind his home he tells me he also dreams of a gazebo, summer parties, petanque games on this airy plinth. Denton grows chardonnay, shiraz, nebbiolo and pinot noir across 60ha in the valley. Though some of it is sold to local winemakers, he reserves a proportion of the annual yield for his own limited-release estate label Denton View Hill.

The architectural language at play in Denton's home is of apiece with DCM's fondness - this, remember, is the firm that gave Melbourne's CityLink freeway its gateway of outsized red ribs - for spare yet dramatic forms. "We've done a number of houses where we've considered architecture as land art and this," Denton says with a proprietorial gesture towards his domain, "has really become another in that exercise. As a firm we've always had an interest in architecture as an object and how that compels a certain design rigour. We've had an interest in sticks. A feel for the details of materials - how they are expressed and work together. And we like cantilevers.

I think you see all those things reflected here in this house. It's a composition of two sticks, one with a cantilever of 9m on one side and 6m over the other. The cantilever comes out of our interest in engineering design. It's a 20th and 21st century expression that has developed strongly and which psychologically positions you in this period of time. The house evokes all these things."

Domestic work, he believes, demands a special discipline from the architect. "The house is small and singular. It's where you have to work hardest because you've got to meet the client's brief and make it fit, and yet still be very reductive. You don't want it to become a messy, busy thing. That's certainly not what we like. Some people like houses all over the place. We don't. That's another sense in which this not dissimilar to other houses we've built." An early point of inspiration was a silo-like house built by partner Barrie Marshall on Phillip Island, now 25 years old: a similarly hard architectural intervention in a soft landscape.

When discussing his ideas about architecture, Denton opts consistently for the first person plural; for "we" over "I". He sees the world through DCM-tinted lenses; the collegial instinct runs deep. It is an open secret in the architecture world, for example, that when the Royal Australian Institute of Architecture awarded John Denton its coveted gold medal in 1995, he declined because Corker and Marshall had not also been laurelled. As a consequence, the timeline of the RAIA gold medal is stuck with a mysterious lacuna for 95: "no award". Chastened, the institute changed its guidelines the next year to allow multiple recipients. In 1996, the golden gong was won by Denton Corker Marshall.

Before we set off for a tour of the house the architect explains how the lower structure, or "stick" to use his preferred term, is topped and tailed by bedrooms with floor-to-ceiling glazed windows: the master bedroom, with grey its dominant tone, faces east. These are spacious, light-filled, unfussy spaces with high ceilings and quality fittings. When we reach the room set aside for Simon and his children, Denton notes the bedspread and furnishings, which, being neither black, white nor a gradation between the two, are a little off key. "I only bought them the bed," he says in a mock-serious tone. "Not the linen. So they're brighter than I'd choose."

Sheets of Corten steel with its attractive patina of protective rust provide the skin of the lower floor. Perforated to admit light into the windows, these sheets of heavy armour are designed to be raised electronically on a hinge at roof level to reveal an unimpeded view. The upper cantilevered stick, in contrast to the rust-red lower level, is clad in black powdered aluminium. An office lies at one cantilevered end of the upstairs section; a spare bedroom at the other. Before ascending the zigzag staircase I pass one of the building's most charming, personal touches: a feature wall of burnished aluminium featuring a tiny painting, the size of a Dutch miniature, placed at eye level. Painted by a distant relative - "a minor member of the Heidelberg school," Denton offers - the image of a fly regarding a dead mouse adorns his own wine label. Painted in 1886, it is titled Sympathy.

The walls and ceiling are finished in oriented strand board made of compressed and shredded wood dyed a warm olive green. This aside, the interior is rather monochromatic. The kitchen is a medley of gleaming white two-pack and steel. The floor is of polished black cement with a granite aggregate sullied by a few hairline fissures. "Local workmen," Denton huffs.

A section of the lounge room is covered by a shaggy grey carpet upon which sit those spacious grey sofas. Above them all looms a powerful didactic work by Marco Fusinato: a celebration of libertarian street protest titled Theses on the Imaginary Party ranging across the same newsreel spectrum of black to white. Denton explains that he found the political pamphlet ideas interesting, and also the ideas of German-Jewish intellectual Hannah Arendt, and Fusinato's work cites both. There is also the not insignificant fact that it chimes nicely with the decor.

The built "object in a landscape", to use Denton's phrase, is no mere aesthetic thing; it lives in nature, is vulnerable to her mercurial moods. The architect admits he is wrestling with the unruly sun, which rises each summer morning over the Great Dividing Range and floods the east-facing master bedroom at the far end of the house. "There's too much light out of a clear blue sky in the morning," he says a little ruefully. "Blinds cut the light a bit but it's still pretty bright at six in the morning. The sun rises over Pyramid Hill and it blasts in.

"We're exposed here to all the elements. The wind is the worst - the biggest issue. Of course, the house is designed so you can shut everything up and the wind has no impact when you're inside. You look outside and see these trees almost blowing over. But when you're in here you don't feel it."

I follow his eyes as they rest on the view. Denton's house is certainly an architectural and engineering statement: a machine for living informed by an industrial aesthetic. But to experience the structure intimately, by standing within it, is to sense its intimate relationship to place. I offer the analogy of the hilltop monastery; he retorts with an even older and deeper association. "This doesn't look like a cave but it essentially acts like a cave. It's nice to have a bit of the hill at your back offering protection, to look out and to look beyond."

Though DCM was formed four decades ago it was not until 1974 that it settled into the working unit that gave Australian architecture such landmark commercial towers as 101 Collins Street and Sydney's Governor Phillip Tower, such notable public buildings as the museums of Sydney and Melbourne. The style of DCM's towers, late modern elaborations in many ways of Mies van der Rohe's glass and steel Seagram building, has been remarkably consistent. They resisted the siren song of postmodernism, though not entirely. "There is one quaint little building in Canberra that we hope will be pulled down," he says with a smile. "We were certainly trained in modernism. When postmodernism came around a lot of people with a similar training tried to jump and got terribly confused. We looked at it and moved on to what became a late modernism. And we've been doing it a long, long time."

DCM played an important role in returning mainstream Australian architecture to its modernist roots at a time when postmodernist play began to descend into decorative cliche. The firm has not been nearly so dismissive of the architectural trend du jour: sustainability. Denton, however, adds the caveat that environmental considerations "are just part of what you do as an architect." His Yarra Valley house, for example, collects rainwater from the roof, uses dam water for the toilets, utilises an air-sourced heat pump for heating and cooling, channels cooling breezes across the lower level and is highly insulated throughout. Green imperatives, Denton believes, have "entered the architectural imagination. We should stop giving sustainability awards. As a matter of fact, I think we have."

DCM made its presence felt upon the Melbourne architecture scene in the mid to late 1980s. The old Victorian boomtown, which had suffered greatly during the architectural depredations of the 1960s and '70s, was being remade under the reign of Labor's John Cain. The firm rose to even greater prominence in the late 1990s under can-do Liberal premier Jeff Kennett. DCM seemed to enjoy a special dispensation from Kennett, leading to complaints in some quarters that the trio was "Kennett's architects"; a claim Denton rejects.

"During that whole period only one of us ever met Kennett. It wasn't me," he says. "We hardly knew the guy." What can't be denied - not that Denton would want to - is the firm's commercial and creative prominence. If Melbourne is one of the world's most architecturally vibrant cities, as many believe, it is due in no small measure to the work DCM has done to renovate the urban fabric. It has reeled in big awards across the range of forms - commercial, public and residential - the most recent being the Australian Institute of Architect's national residential architecture award for a steel and concrete inner city renovation called Zinc House. No other Australian architectural practice has thrust with such sure steps abroad. In China alone, DCM has built more than 50,000 apartments and a shopping centre of 400,000sqm. It has maintained offices overseas since 1980, starting with Hong Kong. And while it has withdrawn from Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Tokyo, it still maintains working offices in London, with 20 staff, and Jakarta with 50.

The burning question, given DCM's stellar corporate trajectory, is this: did Denton ever dream or aspire to the status he now holds in Australian architecture? "Never," he promptly replies. "Not as a student or a graduate. I wanted to become an associate one day. That was about the limit of my aspiration."

The firm's international outlook lies deep within its corporate back story. It began when Denton and Marshall, just out of university, travelled and worked in Europe. "We hitchhiked and bought a Kombi van, drove through India, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria," he recalls. "All the places that cause such trouble now. That really heightened our interests in things outside Australia."

Denton believes Australian architects have a definite way of approaching things, and that the contrast is felt starkly in the UK. "The Brits have a different mindset. Their work can be much stodgier and heavier." He is not the first architect to express a loathing for red tape and sees this as a British curse that has been exported to Australia. The bureaucratisation of the tendering process is a particular beef with him. "Tendering for architecture has become more and more complex," he believes. "And in developing the detailed matrices they use to score submissions they totally lose sight of the purpose of the tender, which is to get the best architect for the project." But then he is not a fan of the sort of aesthetic chaos that prevails in Dubai and Shanghai, where a surfeit of money combines unhappily with a want of taste. "There you see the strangeness of architecture when it becomes marketing icon," he observes. "Take architecture to marketing and it gets exaggerated, extreme, and horrific."

He is not afraid of the big architectural statement. There's plenty of oomph in the DCM portfolio, just as there is in Denton's Yarra Valley home: the first from his own hand. But the big gesture is always tempered by the disciplines of rigorous modernism; disciplines he has made anew. And as the car rolls down the gravel road from Chez Denton and the house recedes, I sense that the phrase "object in the landscape" refers to an equality, or partnership, between architectural art and nature.

The man is clearly enamoured with the "materiality" of his creation and its uncompromising sculptural quality. Yet he is equally in love with the mountain range he views each morning from his bedroom, the vine-clad hills that unroll from every direction and the ever-changing southern sky. People may stop at the property's borders, as they often do, and gaze up at the bold architectural statement above. But the architect himself is likely to be inside his creation, gazing at the clouds. *