House Shaped House
The architecture of the house manifests two fundamental considerations in contradictory opposition. The first is an aspiration to contend with the critical issues of domestic spaces in contemporary Singapore: affordability, aging in place, multigenerational living, and shifting social paradigms among others—issues that an idealistic young architecture practice might indulge in. The second is the intense economic pressure for the house to play a dutiful role as luxury real estate, since the land it sits on is very expensive. With its market value at stake, the house is subservient to expectations of a design “befitting” the well-defined asset class of a Singapore bungalow: oversized bedrooms, ensuite bathrooms, expensive veneer, etc.
The house makes visible the mechanisms and instruments of domestic life: plumbing walls, water tank, cabinetry, and an elevator among others, take shape as monoliths. These monoliths are carefully arranged, like pieces in a still life composition, to organize the interior of the house.
(There is a ritualistic finale to a building in Singapore, a frequent spectacle owing to the short lifecycle of her building stock. Condemned buildings are wrapped in gray construction tarp—appearing like a ghostly abstraction, evocative of a Christo and Jeanne-Claude intervention—as they undergo surgical demolition.)
A mesh facade simultaneously effects abstraction and exposition. It frames the living space as a pure white box but also folds away to reveal a layered envelope of systems to modulate the unwavering tropical heat.
From the adjacent public park, the bigness of the house is neutralized by equally monumental raintrees, evoking an ambiguity of scale further confounded by the oversized elements of the house. A large pitched roof, with the appearance of a thin folded surface, reduces heat gain and contributes to the typological ambivalence of the house, appearing at once prototypical and idiosyncratic.
The floor plans of the house emerge from two distinct and deliberately agnostic conditions, general in shape and unspecific: an open plan on the ground floor responding to the topography of the site and a regular grid of rooms above. It is the monoliths puncturing these spaces that give the rooms specific functions through their adjacencies.
