On the Birrarung in Melbourne, McGlashan and Everist built Heide for John and Sunday Reed in 1967, a Mt Gambier limestone gallery designed to outlast fashion and read, eventually, as a ruin.
Heide Modern photographed by Danny Kai, sits nine kilometres from central Naarm on a stretch of the Birrarung that has carried meetings and making for far longer than the museum has held them. In 1934 John and Sunday Reed bought fifteen acres at Bulleen and opened the property to the writers and painters who would shape Australian modernism. They were participants, not patrons: kitchen garden, collection and household shared with the artists they believed in. The Contemporary Art Society, the Angry Penguins magazine, the slow accretion of an institution; the museum that exists now was assembled in their lifetimes, decision by decision.
In the early 1960s the Reeds commissioned David McGlashan of McGlashan and Everist to draw a new building lower on the hillside. Their brief read more as poem than specification. It asked for something romantic, ageless, possessed of mystery, indifferent to passing fashion. Walls were to be the primary element, extending inward and out. The building, the brief said, should look as if it had grown from the ground and might one day return to it as a ruin in the limestone landscape. Above all, it had to be "a gallery to be lived in."
Completed in 1967, Heide Modern answers the brief almost line by line. Mt Gambier limestone on a 12-inch module sets the rhythm of every plan and elevation. There are no internal doors, no paint, and a tight register of concrete, timber, glass and terrazzo. Rooms read as an abstract composition in the de Stijl manner: asymmetrical, intersecting, dispersed from a central hearth. Walls extend past the envelope into terraced courts where pencil cedars and eucalypts hold the planes in place.
Danny Kai's recent pictures find the building at ease with that intention. North-facing double-height glass opens the living rooms to the parkland. Limestone darkens where rain has fallen against it. The crushed-stone terrace holds a single boulder where a sculpture might sit. Decades on, the wear is part of the argument; the brief asked for a building that would age into the site, and the site has agreed.
Across the path, the black titanium-zinc galleries added later sharpen the contrast without breaking it. Their dark, faceted volumes throw the limestone back at itself and confirm what the Reeds had built toward all along: a place where museum, garden and house are held in the same hand.
