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Architects: KSA Architects
- Area: 226 m²
- Year: 2021
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Photographs:PHX India
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Lead Architect: Nemish Shah
Text description provided by the architects. The House is situated on a small quarter-acre plot, steeply sloping down from the access road and facing a small valley, a waterbody in the middle, and a rising cliff on the other side of the plot. It has many disadvantages! To enable the house to be seen from the road, more than half the site would have to be filled with outside soil, and a new retaining wall of around 10m height would have to be built across the site to retain all of that soil. Of course, this was the client's first choice! But wiser counsel prevailed, and it was decided to keep the natural slope as it is. But there was still a problem. Building along the natural slope would put the house below the level of the cliff on the other side, and inhabitants on the lower floor would not be able to see the sky over the cliff on the other side or even the mountain skyline—and that was a problem that needed solving.
It was then decided to float the house at the level of the access road and keep the natural slope below intact – and, in a sense, to invert the house completely. Instead of being the first place you come to, the Living space is the last. The Bedrooms went above – which is normal, but through a staircase that came before you entered the living space. And the courtyard or the Open Room as we call it – came before everything else.
Horizontally, the house is articulated as three separate volumes, each having its own character derived from its function.
- The Open Room sits on natural ground and comes first. It is a roofless, wallless courtyard articulated as a robust perforated volume.
- The Bridge, made entirely of Steel and Glass, is supported between the Open Room and the Main House. It also acts as the vertical Circulation of the House.
- The Main House, elevated almost 9 meters above the sloping ground, is built as a transparent volume at the lower level with an almost opaque, heavy upper volume.
There is, again, in some sense, an inversion of the typical architectural articulation. Although a generalization, usually, the lighter volume sits on top of a heavier mass. At 300, the lower volume, which is the main living space, is completely transparent, and overhead, the two bedrooms, flanked by solid concrete and stone-clad walls, make up the upper, heavier mass. The elevated Main House is the stilted space the family uses during rains and afternoons – as an outdoor dining or resting space.
The living space is open on all sides (except the side accessed), gives an almost 270° view towards the outside, and is contiguous with the dining and the cooking space. A small private bedroom with its own court sits to the left of the bridge, whereas from the right, the staircase, a part of the bridge volumes, takes one to the upper floors. The two bedrooms on the upper floors are built out of reinforced concrete walls, clad on the outside with Black slate – with windows only towards the front and above – in the form of a skylight, all of this, an attempt to protect the structure from the extreme monsoon of the region but still provide all kinds of natural light within. The upper bedrooms and the living space below are fronted with deep verandas to protect the house from the harsh but beautiful rain.
The house, rather than being a singular whole, is a sum of its parts – but the parts here have a life of their own. It presents as a series of moments, surprising coincidences, and unexpected meeting points – materials, structure, spaces, and people. It is, despite being transparent, a very private house!
