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Architects: C.A.T Design and Build
- Area: 238 m²
- Year: 2020
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Photographs:Ha Pham
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Lead Architect: Truong Cong Tri
Text description provided by the architects. Right from the beginning, the project owner had placed the comfort and well-being of living environment and family members as a top priority. Clearly understanding this goal and combining with a detailed study of the location and conditions of the site, the project team decided to focus on the design of a roof and atriums to overcome disadvantages of orientation and location of the site before thinking about active design solutions. Sustainable design solutions and building physics analysis have been applied to the project's passive designs to optimize energy efficiency while ensuring indoor environmental quality.
In terms of thermal comfort, air moving continuously throughout the building vertically at the atriums and horizontally through the ventilation brick blocks and openings increased the insulation capacity of the building envelope and ability to increase relative humidity of the buffer spaces. It also helped the internal thermal environment to be maintained at a comfortable level naturally and consequently reduced the use of fans and air conditioners all day.
As for visual comfort, by efficiently taking advantage of the function of skylights, despite of the average window-to-wall ratio below 10%, indoor living and working spaces can get natural light during daytime. Therefore, the need for daylight electricity is unnecessary.
The air quality and greenery areas are arranged in the front yard and backyard as a multi-layer filter system to reduce harmful dust and smoke from the exterior of the house. These "green filters" are also located in the kitchen and toilets to prevent dispersal of odors to other indoor spaces. As a result, the indoor air is guaranteed to be clean and safe for users' health.
Not only focusing on passive and active designs, the project team also cared about the locality and environmental friendliness of construction materials and structures. Therefore, the project selected and used local hole clay bricks for walls and in-situ reinforced concrete with local aggregate for structural elements.
The requirement of comfort and well-being of the project owner is also the goal of sustainable construction of the project team. This idea has been applied throughout the concept, design, construction stages and handover. The sustainability of the project is also expressed quantitatively through 51% operation energy savings, 39% water savings and 51% embodied energy savings in materials. Therefore, House of Breeze becomes the first street house in Vietnam to receive EDGE final certificate and EDGE advanced certificate. Currently, the project has been put into operation and really brought a living space fully meeting the owner’s expectations.
