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Architects: Nha Cua Gio
- Year: 2020
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Photographs:Trinh Hai Long
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Lead Architects: Nguyen Minh Thuy, Trinh Hai Long
“MOM house” (MOM: Mother of Mine) began with a sincere wish for a son. Thirty years ago, in this land – the hometown of the client, his parents had to sell his childhood house due to the father’s illness. After the death of the client’s father, he and his mother were forced to move to another city to make a living. Despite all the incredible hardships, she worked day and night to ensure her son had a decent upbringing. Now a man of success, the client wished to build a home for his loving mother in their hometown.
Based on the client’s childhood memories, the architects set out to design a house with details similar to the family’s old house. A house with a rustic shell of a traditional house in the Northern Delta, supported by a modern structure. Traditional elements such as sloping roofs, patios, thresholds, inner yards, proportions, “ong” jar, earthenware, antique ceramic tiles, and gravel wall were selected, and we also used materials from traditional craft villages for the project.
In this project, 2 sides of the plot are blocked by neighboring buildings, a narrow front, and elongated depth. Our approach is to organize the house into open and closed spaces subdivided by the courtyards, the floor plans containing 4 void areas which act as pressurizers - enabling each room of the house to access daylight and wind further through the day. Additionally, using a staggered split-level layout, we create an ever-changing scene as you move around the house, and keep the interaction between every family member and every space together.
A common approach for tube houses in the local area is to construct buildings with the maximum possible height, leaving the ground level disconnected from other functions of the house and upper levels disconnected from the ground. However, we wanted to take a more sensitive approach to the building site and surrounding landscape. In our design, the sloping roof extends from the ground to the 1st floor, and the wide veranda and the low gate create the feeling of a traditional one-story house in the Vietnam countryside. One corner of the roof is lowered to block the western sunlight, and the opposite corner is "lifted" up to catch the southeast wind, welcoming the cool breeze from the sea in summer. There is a slight crease at the end of the roof, directing rainwater flow to one side, then collecting it with an ong jar in the front yard- the same way of Vietnamese in the past used to do.
The project was carefully designed and constructed to make the most of the investment, maintain quality for a long period of time and require little maintenance. We ensured the project was a responsible and sustainable contribution to the local urban theme.
In this project, the materials we chose had to achieve 2 goals:
1, Be eco-friendly, nontoxic, recyclable, sustainable, low co2 emissions rate materials such as unbaked bricks, local stone: gray laterite, slate, cobblestone; foamed concrete, VOC-free paint, ...
2, The materials and details have a traditional look: ornamental screen door, Vietnam folk shoes ancient tiles, embossed tiles with lotus motifs of the Ly Dynasty (the year 1009-1225), Bat Trang craft village's ceramic tiles, and vintage door latch,...
