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Architects: Pencil Office
- Area: 991 m²
- Year: 2012
Text description provided by the architects. A Simple Factory Building addresses two contradicting demands: the mitigation of tropical solar radiation, and the openness, views, and transparency sought by the clients in a basic industrial typology. Completed in 2012, the 10,742-square-foot (998-square-meter) building is located in an industrial area of Singapore. It utilizes a sophisticated 4-foot-deep (1.2-meter-deep) veil fabricated in lightweight EIFS and a bronze full-height window-wall envelope to reconcile this architectural conflict.
Wrapping continuously as a loop around the front elevation, car porch ceiling, rear elevation, and roof, the veil shields the building from the harsh tropical sunlight while calibrating views to the exterior. It also amplifies natural illumination, directs natural ventilation, and conceals mechanical equipment. It calibrates the performance of the building as a climatic engine.
In addition to shading the building from direct sunlight, the veil’s pattern changes to exploit neighboring park views while obstructing unsightly views to the immediate vicinity of the industrial neighborhood. The degree of perforation varies to create openness and privacy in relation to internal programming. From street level, the resulting facade is seen as an anamorphic pattern that creates an optical disturbance to the normative clues that describe the scale of buildings and allow for floor counts. This interference is purposeful; it calibrates the building as an optical device for the performance of inhabitation within and reading from without. Likewise, the normative architectural categories of facade, roof, and ceiling, are upset by the continually wrapping veil; the distinct architectural categories are merged into one continuous deep envelope.
