Living in a quality life alongside the flood-prone area easy not something anyone would have thought about. Like obviously, you don’t know when nature will act harshly. However, three families living with their children’s house in Chau doc, Vietnam not only thought about it but took an action for that. How? Let’s see.
They contacted Nishizawa Architects and told everything about the situation and their needs. Nishizawa Architects is a Siagon-based studio led by Shunri Nishizawa located in Ho Chi Minh City.
Chau Doc is a border town close to the Cambodian boundary developed along the Mekong River’s branch. It takes 7 hours of traveling from Ho Chi Minh city by bus and ferry to finally arrive in this town with the environmental surrounding.
After examining the surrounding and examining the lifestyle of locals, Nishizawa came to the common ground of fetching raw materials from surroundings and creating an outlook and interiors of houses complying with the local standards and regionality.
According to the architects, the area has divided into several layers: 1) floating houses on the river, 2) an embanked road on two sides with main traffic for locals 3) plenty of pilotis houses on the other side of the road extended by the small private bridges, 4) last one, endless greenery of rice fields.
Here the pilotis houses are combined with stone or concrete columns on the ground and timber frames with corrugated metal panels. This area had height limitation up to the extent to save it from flood and limited dimensions for the use of timber frames as they follow the local daily floor-sitting lifestyle.
As said the architects learned the deep culture of the people living there and then designed the reconstruction of three houses in Chau doc. Let’s look at the details of the project:
- Project Name: Houses in Chau Doc
- Location: Chau Doc, Vietnam
- Year: 2017
- Architect: Nishizawa Architects
As described to Archdaily by Nishizawa Architects, the project focused on three new architectural prospects apart from using locally available timber and corrugated metal panels:
1) To invert the roof shape from an ordinal-roof into a butterfly-roof in order to open the interior space to the surrounding environment, and then cover all the site by 3 butterfly-roofs in different heights.
2) To hang up rotating metal windows from end to end at the big openings between each roof and façades to adjust the amount of sunlight and natural wind.
3) To replace all the internal solid walls into movable partitions to create one big continuous space.
The main aim of integrating these three principles was to admire contemporary space with all the natural elements like sunlight, wind, water, soil, and plantings. To retain the regional culture the exterior wall was constructed using concrete but the woven bamboo pattern was blended.
Conclusion
This way the Nishizawa architects helped three families to have a quality living with the cultural touch and spirit in the existing houses in Chau doc.
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