STACKING BOX
Nguyễn Đặng Anh Dũng
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Nguyễn Hữu Thể Trang l Nguyễn Văn Trung l Trần Viết Lợi l Võ Đình Huỳnh
Supervisor : Võ Đình Huỳnh
Photographs : Dũng Huỳnh
Most of the shophouses which have been recently built in developing urban areas – apart from their advantages in terms of urban planning – not only address outstanding issues on architectural aesthetic, suffer from a lack of spatial organization diversity and the rigid uniformity of modules but also limit personal features and the town’s liveliness. These drawbacks appear to be the reasons why there are a great number of people who are not interested in this type of building. Thus, the relevant market of such kind of building has been gradually down, forming deserted areas.
Before being renovated, the house was a combination of two linked corner houses and located in a new urban area of Ho Chi Minh City. While such corner houses had the same appearance, they were different in vertical direction. In addition, they also encountered the same situation as other instant-designed neighborhoods.
The demand for satisfaction with simple functional needs of the young couple, the house’s owner, appeared to us as an advantage in developing the project’s corner location. The proposed design plan allocated nearly the entire ground floor for business and structured a flexible window system for the purposes of creating an open space as a promotion for the area’s vitality.
The existed partition between the two houses is demolished. The basic and old interior structure is retained while the shape of the stairway is proportionated to suit the new design. This corner house is renovated into common function one that stretches the space by nature’s lateral azimuth horizontal direction, which replaces the original azimuth stand artificial vertical one.
The rhythm of the balconies’ slight curve and the floor elevation variance between those terrace houses were the details we respected and emphasized in the new design through the vertical sun louvres around the balcony and the green buffer zones behind it. The rhythm evolving from the flat surface into blocks has effectively created “stacking boxes”, which merge into each other and hovered above the ground floor space.
On the long main West façade of the building, instead of merely avoiding the sun, a glass stair block is suddenly abruptly placed, optimizing the sunset view. Buffer spaces or gardens that are put behind it perform not only the flexible changes between the transparent and reflective quality of glass material but also the natural light, sky colors and views from different elevations. They all create diverse and emotion-evoking experiences while feeling the change of space at every single moment.
SaiGon , 01.2018 - 01.2019
