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Architects: Czarl Architects
- Area: 354 m²
- Year: 2010
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Photographs:Tim Nolan
Text description provided by the architects. The patrons of this project are young professional involved in medical R&D with a teenage daughter and an elderly person. The client has expressed their desire to live in a house where parents, children and grand parents can live, work, play and enjoy hobbies together interactively. A sense of fun and adventure, green consciousness and functionality are a few key concerns.
Site ContextLocated within the Thompson Tree conservation area, the site is well surrounded by mature trees and dense vegetation and is accessible from the front by a steep road. Unlike most other landed housing sites in Singapore, the site is perculiar in shape with it being a long narrow plot with its length running parallel to an adjacent steep road.
Design Approach
Due to the tight constraints of the site, there is a need to compact programmatic spatial requirements and formal expression such that function and form are cohesive and complimentary to each other. This led to an exploration of a different systematic approach to the site and space planning and formal expression.
Here, the living room is the heart of the house and it is necessarily accentuated by introducing a double volume above it. The main circulation and the rest of the house is organized around this main anchor space.
The continuous RC slab is deployed as a strategy to organize spatial and programmatic requirements while integrating with visual aesthetics. Various spaces of the house are strung along this continuous surface in succession so that different programs of the house are able to operate co-dependently.
Taking off from the ground floor in the form of the pool stairs, the slab continues as a landscaped deck , followed by a partially sloping plane on the 2nd floor ( for the bedroom ) before upturning and folds back upon itself to become a viewing a green sloped platform at 3rd storey. The slab yet upturn again eventually to form the roof.
By blurring the distinction between the vertical and horizontal, the inside and the outside, the serpentine flow of the slab becomes a legible architectural stroke of formal expression. By drawing references from the steep slope terrain just outside of the boundary,the tilt of the pool stairs and the landscape on the 2nd floor, for instance, can be seen as an immediate extension of the terrain beyond.
Elsewhere in the house, in a similar tongue-in-cheek act of subversion of the cantilevered portion of the house, the cantilevered box is deliberately tilted to reference yet again the sloped terrain while creating a playful adventurous interior for the teenage occupant. Here, the raised floor becomes an underground hideout, a storage as well as a sunken area for bath.
Above, the sloped roof presents a pleasant tumbling green that greets the eye from the master bedroom, replacing the need for another conventional privacy screen for the master occupants on the 3rd Floor.
