Archisteem 18: Friendly Architecture Curation - Residence 54 in Bangkok
Today's curated project: Residence 54 in Bangkok
Previously, I had curated 3 large-scale housing projects which can host for more than 1,000 people. You can look back via this link. 1 2 3
Today, I would like to get into something lighter and smaller, refurbishment of individual housing like terrace, semi-d, and bungalow. Currently, I am also involved in helping some clients to design houses. To be honest, the scale of the house may not be big, but when things get personal, it is not easy to handle. The architect and designer have to grasp the client’s taste and preference when it comes to the design. When I mentioned personal, it is because every house is tailored to the specific user and family. Nonetheless, the process of interacting with the clients, brainstorming for the design, developing a design and finally implementing it is something fun to go through.
I shall be sharing some interesting small projects of refurbishment around the world (preferably tropical countries’ projects) for this week.
This project is led by SPC Technocons took place in Bangkok, Thailand. The project covered an approximate 200m² of 2 stories townhouse and was completed around 2016. The project is a renovation work of a 30 years old building. In addition, the building had structural failure as the architect found that the beam of the building has crack marks, which may come to collapsing of the upper structure.
The old townhouse before renovation, it did seem bit hedious and suffocating to me.
Although the building is named as a townhouse, to me it seemed to be a semi-detached house with a relative wide building width. The car porch can cater for 3 cars meaning the width could be around 9m to 10m (approximate 32 ft). Although the house is relatively short (about 2 times the width of the building), it looks spacious and welcoming as it has a wide body. In Malaysia, it is hard to find such wide body property available unless a higher end property. Personally, I would rather prefer a shorter one with wider body terrace house; this could allow more natural light and natural ventilation to penetrate through.
Back to the renovation, as the architect found out about the structural failure, they decided to keep the structure and repair it by adding steel structure to support the existing concrete structure. It can be seen that the architect used X-bracing to further strengthen the structure and adding steel columns to fixate the structure. A more cost-efficient way as it does not require any demolition.
As for the client’s brief, the house has to be new in terms of spatial arrangement and façade. Thus, the architect created interactive space with different variety of ‘walls’. Wall itself can be transparent, semi-transparent to fully opaque. Transparent can be done with glass, semi-transparent can be a wire mesh wall and opaque could be a brick wall. The architect tried to minimize the use of opaque wall and play with transparent and semi-transparent walls to the house spacious and allowing natural daylight to lit the internal spaces. For my personal preference, I would love to stay connected to nature in some part of my house and even in office. It is suffocating for me to stay in an artificial light lit space for a whole day. Kinda depressing for me. Plus, the architect used wire mesh wall to grow crawler plants that will become a green view for the client to enjoy.
In order to create lightness for the house, the architect chose steel components like the Corten steel folding door and the stairs. The opaqueness was kept to the minimal and this indeed had made the overall space larger. The architect wanted to create a continuous flow from the front to the back. As for the upper floor, the room that is facing the car porch is installed with a rotating window that can be operated manually. This makes the room can be extended spatially and connected with the car porch below, imagine the client can have gatherings both on top and on ground level, talking to each other boundlessly.
From the design preference and taste, I could say the client is young and adventurous. With the bedroom available, it is most likely to be a young couple. Plus, the house was designed to have little privacy in the interior, meaning to say there are no kids or third party around. Pretty cool and I would love to have sort of this approach to my future house.
How’s your taste and preference for your dream house? Or you have anything to share about your current ones?
Source of images used and reference article. Click here
Hope you enjoy the curation. If you have any projects that you wished to be curated, do drop a comment to me. Any critics and suggestions about my curation are welcome!
This is an #archisteem post.
A new tag that is to curate our existing built environment and also future built environment development. Want to know more? Read here.
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I agree on the part about relying on artificial light. Natural light is always the best. I like to sit my desk in front of the window, so if I'm reading or on the computer for a long time I can give my eyes a break by looking far outside.
Yup, that's how I like my workplace and home to be :) facing walls the whole day will stress me out.
Amazing architecture. Loved to see it. Don't know if I can have it anytime.
Ya, you can. Believe in yourself! Thanks for dropping by ;)
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