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Architects: i.House Architecture and Construction
- Area: 272 m²
- Year: 2018
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Photographs:Hiroyuki Oki
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Manufacturers: Saint-Gobain, Schneider Electric, AkzoNobel, Hai Long glass, Toto
Text description provided by the architects. This house is located on the outskirts of Hung Yen province. Facing an arteryconnecting provinces and bordering a local road, the residence stretches on an idealland area with 8.6m in width and 26,8m in length. Bringing several advantages, thisgeographical feature, at the same time, presents the architects with certain challengessuch as fume, dust and noise from the roads when designing the house. Taking theseenvironmental drawbacks into consideration, we decided to leave the first 11 meters infront of the house for a playground and a parking space, offsetting the adverse impactscreated by the above factors on the house. The green of plants and flowers is optimizedto put the house back into nature, balancing with the rough look of bricks and concretesand also to immerse the residents in green spaces.
The house design needs to meet the spatial needs of the owners and their two children,and there must be separate ground rooms in the front for business and transportmatters. Accordingly, we divided the whole construction into two rectangular blocks:vertical and horizontal, with the front for business and the rear for staying. The backblock, consisting of a kitchen, a dining room and bedrooms (including one for guests) islinked to the front block (a service room, a sitting room and two bedrooms for children)through a tiled roof. Thus, the two blocks are connected in terms of space and coherentin terms of function and above all, this structure makes all the rooms filled with naturallight.
The house is exposed to the sun from morning until late afternoon, so the level of heatis very high, although in this case, the phenomenon of "urban heat island" has beenruled out. As a solution, we kept the outer wall, removed the inner walls, and erectedthick walls on the sun-exposed side, and cavity walls to the wind side so that the housecan quickly disperse the summer heat. In addition, the ranges of two-meter bamboostogether with the cavity walls covered with rangoon creeper and tigon function as the airfilter that removes dust and brings fresh air into the house. Besides, in NorthernVietnam, the winter usually brings with its low temperature and the freezing gusts ofwind, so the full doors of glass not only controls the temperature but also invite light andadd space to the house. Rain is another factor to also be taken into account in thedesign, then the roof under which various trees are planted is completely removed toallow for the sun passage and rain drops so that the development of these green plantsare completely governed by nature.
Finally, the level of man-made energy has been minimized because nature has been aregular guest to the house at our agreement and the homeowners’ through everycarefully designed door and corner. And here, a famous saying by Architect Luis Kahnsuddenly echoes in the air “A room is not a room without natural light”.
