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Architects: FCHY architect lab
- Area: 76 m²
- Year: 2021
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Photographs:Hsiu-Chung Yang
"House No.58" is a renovation project of an old apartment. It is located on the first floor of an alley with intimate scale and complex context in a high-density residential area. There are many small shops, parking lots, and various types of residences in the neighborhood. Organized- chaotic parking arrangements on the street along with neighborhood gatherings, chatting on the street, hanging out the laundry outside of the window, and storing stuff in front of the door and/or house temporarily during daily life. It’s an alley where you can sense living.
The neighborhoods were used to have strong social connections in the past with the street house blends residential and commercial mixed-use. Therefore, the design of traditional street houses is often ignored the residential life privacy along the street. After we’d started to be part of the project, we’d started and reconsidered the ambiguous relationship and the interface in between modern lifestyle versus street alleys. At the same time, we are also concerned about the problem of the darkness and stuffy airflow in the street houses and are trying to find ways to reconnect the interior and external environments.
To increase the flexibility of the space, we removed the original interior partition walls, changed the front façade, and opened the roof of the backyard to make it into a courtyard. It helps to bring the air and the light back into the interior space. Then we set up the bathing transparent glass box right beside the courtyard connecting to interior space to make it a larger hierarchical courtyard for living space.
We tried to replace the traditional wall with our handmade materials to enhance the fluidity in terms of the air and the lights of the space to keep our core design concept. We’d proposed several formulas and started to experiment with the idea. The partners of our studio tried so many concrete ratios to make the hollow wall brick as thin as possible, finally, we got 10mm thin brick. We expect our handmade brick wall to be an ambiguous façade between the street and the private house. The façade brick wall fragments the interior messages which preserve the privacy when opening to the outside street.
When the owner was not in the house, there were neighbors sitting and chatting closely on the semi-outdoor entrance stairs. Streets and the house began to merge. When the host reads at the desk, he/she can see bicycles and neighbors slowly passing by, but his/her thoughts are not interrupted. The activities of the street and the interior are not overly exposed but not absolutely separated from each other. We attempted to make the life of the first floor along the street more detailed in symbiosis with the street via using our handmade brick wall application.
