The reveal drawing records window reveals on ten domestic projects over a ten year period, a study of the relationship of windows to wall thickness. The selection is not thorough, as there tends to be many reveal conditions on any single project, rather the drawing shows a development through type of an attitude to the cut through the wall, the wall thickness, the position of the window in the depth of the reveal, and a trend towards rebate in the reveal to recess the window frame, enabling a simple external reading of ‘void’.

The splayed reveal is different from the straight (perpendicular) reveal in that it is a spatial move, exaggerating the thickness of wall therefore relating the interior to the exterior. Each of the reveals in the drawing is represented as a line, disconnected from the room and the exterior, but articulating the plan profile. The line moves from the inside to the outside and represents a transition from room to elevation. Window joinery is represented by a light shade. The final two diagrams point to an ambition, the window placed either inside or outside the wall thickness.

I visited St.Peter’s Church by Sigurd Lewerentz in Klippan, in the Skåne region of Sweden, in February 2012. I had not been particularly aware of Lewerentz’s work outside the Woodland Cemetery, but had visited St. Mark’s Church in Bjorkhagen, Malmo theatre, and his work Malmo Eastern Cemetery on the same trip. I recall arriving in Klippan late afternoon following a drive from Malmo. My travel companions and I were on our way to Helsinborg to take the ferry to Elsinore, then on to Louisiana Museum in Humlebaek and then Copenhagen. There was snow on the ground and the day was grey in the unremarkable ‘new town’ of Klippan. I was aware of the building but had not studied it, at first taking in its setting, a pond, and a berm, then a descent and ascent to a deep entrance socket. We walked through and around, silent, taking in the gravity of the layout and form, the relentless use of dark brick in varying bond with the particular jointing method, the internal imposing steel cross, the darkness, the sloping ground, a mound, a deep cut, an almost topographical experience. The space was being used for practice by some young adults for an upcoming service or performance, their colourful clothes and projector odd in the space. We moved in silence.

I had a particular fascination with the reveal of a small window, the glass pane fixed to the external wall. From the dim interior, the glass was imperceptible due to the absence of frame, the thick reveal fully expressed, the material inside the same as outside, a clear expression of a homogenous opening in a masonry wall and a perfect relationship to the exterior. To me this was a powerful evocation of light and time, enhanced to heroic level by this solemn but uplifting experience far from home. I imagined the building as a ruin, desolate, abandoned, just the core material of the uncut brick remaining.

For Lewerentz, closure of openings was effected by placing a frame across the opening on the face of the wall, whether inside or outside, ensuring completeness in the wall surface and opening. A similar homogeny is evident in Patrick Gartmann’s single family home on a sloping site overlooking Chur at the base of Montalin in Switzerland. Here, the entire building envelope is constructed from concrete with the windows placed either behind the wall thickness or in it. This project has influenced details in our work but it is the relationship to the landscape which enthrals. The idea of a building technique whereby cuts in the walls frame the view in the most simple manner possible.

Equally, Utzon’s Can Lis on the island of Majorca seeks to engage with the views of the sea, which are controlled through thickened window openings in walls constructed from local sandstone. Large panes of glass are mounted on the outer surface of the wall so that no frames are visible. The effect is mesmerising.

The play of light on a reveal, enhanced by thickness, has been a constant interest and strong influence on our work. This intermediate zone between inside and out, between shelter and exposure, between public and private, has been slowly transforming as we develop our thinking about these relationships and about how we relate our constructed spaces to landscape.

The majority of our house projects are of masonry construction, with often simple constructional methods of insulated weight bearing cavity walls, developed with both structural rigour and thermal efficiency in mind, but arranged to suit the visual aspirations of the project. In this respect, our interest in greater wall thickness derives not from modern constructional requirements but from a desire to enable decisions about window position stemming from recollections of deep set windows in the stone walls of vernacular dwellings in Ireland, in particular on their gables. Thickened walls are for that reason employed in our projects mainly in the gables of linear elements or where there is a particular relationship with the exterior which we wish to emphasise. The increased depth of the wall combined with the position of the window frame serve to articulate the window opening in a more emphatic way in terms of light and shade, highlighting the compositional strategies present in the elevation.

This fundamental architectural language of solid and void, the clarity of wall and opening, of thickness and weight, are enhanced by the manipulation of the expression of the window opening.

Amongst all of the types of reveals in our work, the splayed reveal is the most provocative, and offers some insight into a series of spatial techniques and devices which characterise the work.

At House at Lough Beg, in Ballyscullion Park in mid-Ulster, the splayed reveal primarily relates to the reception of light or the intended visual field. It is also associated with the perception of thickness, to external composition and its relationship to modern painting, and to the introduction of a diagonal or deviation in the orthogonal in our plans. The splayed reveal is about a diagonal aspect as opposed to a perpendicular, and also about a formal rotation. It is also a gesture to the particular expansive, rarified landscape of Ballyscullion.

An interest in composition has emerged in our work informed by a background of study and development of proportion systems which were employed in our work as a way of making decisions mainly about aperture and about the ratios of solid to void. Proportion was initially used as a mechanism to order the work, but once fully developed and understood as a compositional tool within the practice, had become looser and more intuitive, and the work was being developed using a free-er hand but tuned or adjusted for pragmatic reasons. In addition, a deep interest in Modern Art and a growing understanding of the compositional values in the works of Mondrian, Albers, Martin, Innes and others, has influenced a way of seeing which informs our attitude to creating forms and composing elevations.

The splayed reveal is a compositional move on elevation where the window opening is placed so that it is aligned precisely with the edge of the building when viewed from the outside, encompassing wall thickness and enabling the shape of the opening to engage with the shape of the elevation in an abstract way. Often the splayed reveal is combined with a thickened wall.

At Ballyscullion, the gable window is positioned on the edge, and the reveal is chamfered, combining with a thickened wall and relating to the solid, employing deep brick reveals, brick heads and honed granite thresholds through the full depth of the wall, inside and out, in a direct response to its place both in the sense of capturing a particular view, and in the reading of the building as an eroded object.

The effect of the arrangement and positioning of the opening on the edge of the gable is to give an illusion of weightlessness, of giving the impression that the gable has no weight and therefore applies no downward pressure on the rectangular form of the window aperture and its chamfered support. Of course we can discern that the weight of the wall is considerable and the material is modular not homogenous, and that some kind of concealed structural support is required to achieve the illusion. Here, we employed a reinforced in-situ concrete support wall on the ground floor, as an inner wall leaf, which was required to extend fully across the gable and to return around the corner perpendicular to the gable to the next window opening. This constructional technique was also employed at the opposite end of the linear plan to achieve an open corner.

A reasonably substantial attitude to structure and construction in order to achieve the desired effect.

At Ballyscullion, the landscape is gently undulating. The hinterlands around Lough Neagh and Lough Beg are almost flat, but the local topography and features of the parkland provide the context for the development of the relationship between internal space and woodland, view, and rising field. This is one of a series of photomontages, where a photographic image of the viewing position of the occupant of any room, taken by tripod at sitting height and orthogonal to the wall containing the window, is superimposed on the view from the same window taken at the same angle but just outside the corresponding window. The built reality of the wall, the treatment of the head and threshold, the geometry of the wall reveal and the position of the window framing within this reveal are all evident, as is the continuity of the landscape beyond the solid sections of the external wall.

The landscape is viewed as aspect, in the way in which things can be viewed or regarded, and the windows viewed as frames. A reveal of landscape from rooms through the language of the practice.