This is a house that was built around two important requirements. Firstly it had to serve as an artist’s studio for printmaking in part of the house. Secondly, it had to be a self-sufficient house in that it would use the energy of the sun to power the pumping of water, night illumination, heating water and mechanical ventilation.
The house located on the outskirts of the city near a marshy lake at the foot of a small hill with hardly any development around, became a place to understand the definition of the contemporary (sub) urban house specific to the way of life of its inhabitants. The house organizes itself largely into a linear block - an anchor in the shifting marshy background and the uncertainties of suburbia. The place for worship is expressed distinctly as a vertical point that moves slightly out of the place of the linear configuration, around which one partly circumscribes as one enters the house.
In a gesture that seeks to reconstruct the severed house-street relationship synonymous with the growing isolation of the urban family, the street deck predominantly leans over to the street edge in a vestigial longing. The long block that holds the spaces for living and the artist's studio, is penetrated by light that differentiates and modulates spaces. The long block connects to the deck, which contains the car parking and kitchen below. The prayer block at this pivotal location is washed by the morning light and is separated from the main block and the deck physically with light.
© Mathew and Ghosh Architects
- The landing becomes a library and reading space, which connects the upper and lower levels to the street deck in front. The intermediate location of this space is a transition between the private spaces of the bedrooms, the studio and the over-looking space of the dining and living areas.
- The studio is a self-sufficient unit that has its own facilities for printmaking such as an acid basin in the balcony outside, a private access to the ground floor. The light filling the space gives it the aspect of a work place that can shut itself off from the house if required.
- The low lying land had to be filled and a column beam structure supports the entire structure which offered the possibility to cantilever, open up large areas for light and air.