SINGAPORE SITE.

A tall thin house in the Singapore suburbs suggests new patterns of development which will increase density, much needed in a tightly-packed island. But it draws on Chinese tradition and abstracts from it.

Land is at a premium in the island state of Singapore, so permitted densities have been allowed to rise in the suburbs. As a result, new individual houses can be more tightly packed together and made taller than what was allowed before. So the Teng residence, designed for a single professional man and his mother, has a parti which almost totally covers the plot, leaving only enough room for a patio at the front of the house and long thin gardens at side and back. Such little strips of open land would seem very mean in other latitudes, but at the equator, where there is vertical sun and luxuriant vegetation, they can work and be pleasant to look into, if not be in.

SCDA Architects wisely chose to elaborate on an ancient model for the basic design. The traditional Chinese shop house has a very deep plan with narrow frontages. To make it bearable, atria (in the proper sense) were often carved into the middle of the footprint to bring light and air to most of the inner rooms. At the Teng house, the stratagem is abstracted and used with finesse. Basically, it has a three-storey stack of rooms at front and back with a vertical circulation and light void in the middle. This shaft of light is irregularly linked to a long metre-wide slot between the house proper and a blank wall that rises between the house and its neighbour to the left.

Only at ground floor level is the wall pierced, to allow views from the living room to the thin garden between the two houses. So the living room, the first space you come to after the constrained entrance from the car port, is full of light both from above (the central well) and the side (the sliver of garden between neighbour and shear wall). Luminance is increased by white walls and floor. And the almost surreal device of a long L shaped pool which reflects light upwards, and acts almost as a barrier between formal and informal worlds. Inner areas of the house are suggested through translucent glass panels.

A stair is cantilevered over the granite clad pool, drawing you up through the central well. At first floor level, the straight flight converts to a sculptural spiral, almost hovering in space, and connecting first and second floors. Honed steel and wood bridges connect front and back stacks of rooms across the void. Up at the top is one of the most moving spaces of the house: the studio that looks into a calm little patio where Typha Angustifolia grows against the white concrete shear wall, and looks out through a louvred screen over the more conventional houses around.

Externally, the louvred first and second floors make an elegant, veiled box hovering over the virtually transparent ground level, which can open at the front to throw living room and patio into one large space, interior and exterior at the same time. Structure is largely steel, over a concrete ground floor. The upper floors have, in effect, a double wall with the louvres shading a glass box that has movable panes so spaces can be cooled naturally as well as by air conditioning.

Architects

SCDA Architects, Singapore

Design team

Chan Soo Khian, Rene Tan

Structural engineer

T.H. Ng Management & Consultancy Services

Services engineer

GKL Associates

Photographs

Peter Mealin