Safe Haven Bath house by TYIN Tegnestue

In order to leave the locals useful model for future construction, the project were highly localized, built with the help of locals, using locals materials and based on local traditional methods.

Safe Haven Bath House

Design Team: TYIN Tegnestue

Location: Ban Tha Song Yang, Thailand

Cost: 3300 USD

Status: Completion 2009

TYIN Tegnestue is a non-profit organization working humanitarian through architecture. TYIN is run by five architect students from NTNU and the projects are financed by more than 60 Norwegian companies, as well as private contributions.

The Safe Haven Bath house is a community project done by TYIN for Safe Heaven Orphanage, which is located at Northern Thailand.   Safe Heaven Orphanage houses 49 children that is care by a fantastic woman, Tasanee Keereepraneed, a Karen origin.  While all the children come from different places, one thing they all have in common is their Karen heritage. ( The Karen or Kayin, are a group of ethnic peoples who reside primarily in southern and southeastern Myanmar. The Karen make up approximately 7 percent of the total Burmese population of approximately 50 million people. A large number of Karen also reside in Thailand, mostly on the Thai-Burmese border. Source: Wikipedia)

The new bathhouse covers basic needs like toilets, personal hygiene and laundry. A simple structure was already built and became the framework for the project.The most intimate functions are located in the two separate parts of plastered concrete blocks. In the central area you find a space for bathing that opens up towards the vast teak plantation. The bathing area is only partly privatized, adapted to Karen culture. A tilted facade of bamboo covers the front of the building and creates a passage, tying the functions together.

A great challenge in this project is that sewage and drainage had to be dealt with on-site and handle large amounts of water during the rainy season. The waste from the toilets passes through pipes into buried. Concrete tanks that are drained from the bottom and sides. Gravel and wooden floors are easy to keep clean and dry, and all wet rooms are drained by using layers of stone and gravel.

The existing sanitary facilities at Safe Haven Orphanage, as well in the district in general, are narrow, dark and have concrete flooring that accumulates water and dirt. With this bathhouse TYIN has tried alternative solutions that hopefully will be an important asset in the future development in the district. The climate of northern Thailand makes good personal hygiene essential to prevent diseases, especially for small children. With this bathhouse TYIN wanted to create well functioning and dignified facility for personal hygiene.

via TYIN Tegnestue

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Villa Astrid by Wingardh Arkitektkontor

The difficulties of the site, is the oblique angle of the steep cliff to the view, and a huge rock that was incorporated into the design of the resort house.

Villa Astrid

Design Team: Wingardh Arkitektkontor AB

Location: Gothenburg, Sweden

Status: Completed 2005

Located at the scenic West Swedish landscape, the Villa Astrid was tucked between two houses and consisted mainly of rugged and fairly steep rock. The detailed plans was dictated by the local building code, which stipulates a maximum 3.5-metre eaves height and a roof slope of 14 to 27 degrees. With the client requirement of a two-storey building, the answer was to sink the upper floor.

Villa Astrid is low and light, standing there beneath a large pine tree at the end of a small lane. There is a car port and a storage room to the left and you enter the building through the only entrance in the otherwise solid gable end. The sunken atrium courtyard makes an astounding impression as you step inside. What appeared to be a low building suddenly becomes three storeys high.

The rock with which it is united is exposed indoors and forms a wall of the deep courtyard admitting daylight to the reception rooms on the ground fl oor. At the same time the social and working rooms on the upper floor focus on the view, imparting a twist to the building – a contrapposto like a human fi gure with the hips and shoulders in slightly different directions.

Villa Astrid has an open-plan kitchen, a separate dining room and a large lounge nestled between the atrium and a sea view with the afternoon sun and sunsets. The latter are the reasons for the twist of the house. At the end of the space, there is a work shelf raised one floor above the cascading rock. The gable end facing the rock is mainly a huge insulated glass window that has been sunken into a seam-drilled slit in the rock. The floor below has two children’s bedrooms, a living room and the parents’ bedroom. Swing-sliding doors and insect-proof ventilation openings provide direct contact with the outside in all these rooms.

The roof is made of cast-in-place concrete, insulated with Foamglas and then clad with metal sheeting. The walls have been built in solid, light-weight concrete, plastered on the inside and outside, and then clad with metal sheeting. The black, pre-patinated, copper sheets will slowly become verdigrised. Released copper ions are bound by limestone gravel around the base of the building. It is pure and requires no maintenance.

via Wingardh Arkitektkontor

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House in Romeirão by ARX Portugal Arquitectos

Our architecture doesn't follow a lexicon or a stabilized language. In every new project we try to find the "vocables" for a specific language to the new context. As in the House in Romeirão, the site's natural beauty dictated the entire house design.

House in Romeirão

Design Team: ARX Portugal Arquitectos

Location: Romeirão, Ericeira, Portugal

Status: Completed 2003

The site has a strong rural character, with small plantations, orchards and pathways limited by roughly made stone property walls and, once in a while, houses, scattered in the landscape.  It is a steep slope facing south over the valley, furrowed by a small river and a mountain in the background. While the upper half of the site is ramped, the lower is built in steps. In the transition between both two clear references became the starting point for the project: a walnut tree and a watering tank.

The first site visits immediately suggested a volume lying on the slope, facing the entrance walkway and sheltering the house from the neighbours while opening the interior views to the southern valley.  The house develops in an intimate relation with the ground, penetrating it as the slope increases and eventually becoming part of the mountain where one can walk; then it is displaced while descending, reappearing on the slope.

A long volume was then drawn, like a line bent over itself and over the water tank and the tree. Between those elements the primary exterior space was created.  Along the house courtyards were excavated building spaces of intimacy and peace, generally lacking in an overexposed context: the entrance courtyard, the guestroom courtyard and the one of the corridor.  The edges of this tubular form bifurcate interacting in different ways with the exterior: the end of the main room is narrow and high overlooking the eastern valley; the wide and low end of the living room is suspended over the southern valley.

The private area of the house is serviced by an austere corridor whose ends represent opposite realities: the northern one opens to an intimate courtyard dug on the ground whilst the southern one opens to vast landscape, with the walnut tree in the foreground and the mountain in the distance.

via ARX

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Villa Chabrey by GD architectes

Sculptured in wood and fitting in with the topography of the orchards, this house reminds the world of a hangar and of a barn. It also preserves the rural characteristics of the surroundings and the organisation of the surface area around the positioning of the space it follows the distinctive typology of a farmhouse.

Villa Chabrey

Design Team: GD Architectes (GeninascaDelefortrie SA Architectes FAS SIA)

Location: Chabrey, Switzerland

Status: Completion 2006

The presence of the cemetery, gardens, meadows, pastures & the lake constituting this site overlooking rolling Chabrey is a living testimony to the history of this village. In this context sensitive location, a modern house has to be build without disturb the balances involved.

Villa Chabrey is an interpretation given to the particular specifications desired, its shape and its materialization. Indeed, this house maintains the typology old farm and proposes its report to the field, the play of its roof and by abstraction of its envelope, a term referring to both the world of shed, barn and landscape.

The house is organized around a central space-kitchen, dining-distributing respectively private area - bedroom, dressing room, office, the board friends, living room and indoor pool. If, in contrast to the traditional cuisine (the fire), distribution space allows a perception of a whole house and offers immediate relation to the landscape, other parts have a more confidential, both in size and framed by their connection to the outside.

This house has two registers of expression-one, outdoor-rough; the other interior-Precious-. This shift is the desire to perpetuate the character of the place where it is part and respond to the desires of the client.

via GD Architectes

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House for Everybody by Kohki Hiranuma Architect

In trying to create an architectural space that establishes in its environment, the house was design & built with focused on the volumn of the small space in the particular size of its' residents of 150mm height.

House for Everybody

Design Team: Kohki Hiranuma Architect & Associates

Location: Kusatsu City, Shiga, Japan

Status: Completion 2004

This House for Everbody is a three stories house with total floor area of less than 100m2. The site covers a rectangle area of 8m opening by 11m depth, and there was a requirement to prepare a car port on the opening, is on south side of the site, facing to 6m width street. The residents of the house are a family of six contains two household. The family member’s average height is comparatively small that is on 150cm level, so that the point of the project is focused on its volume or height of the small space in the particular human scale, and is required to establish its variation.

With these, the architects was experimenting with ways to root each space in its environment and to redefine the projct identity in response to the unique conditions of house residents.

The requirements from the client and the governing regulations that often bring a difficulty to a small project, and they compose a “condition”. Kohki Hiranuma Architect managed to grasp the achieving point that these “conditions” develop themselves into a “representation” by not receiving them as prejudiced matter but receiving these “conditions” obediently.

The house has won the Grand Design International Architecture Award , England in 2004.

via khaa

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Koushu House by Akasaka Shinichiro Atelier

The Koushu house caughts between two worlds: with noisy bustling road at the front but an haven in the backyard with wetlands, forest and a river running through.

Koushu House

Design Team: Akasaka Shinichiro Atelier

Location: Sapporo, Japan

Status: Completed 2006

The Koushu House is situated at the bustling road that connecting the west district to the south district of Sapporo City.  Having this noisy street in the front and residences on both sides, the site locates in an urban environment.  Although in the backyard, it holds rich natural aspects, such as wetlands and forest with meandering of the rivers flowing through the area.  There is a “gap” between these differences in this surrounding environment.  The main theme of this project was to relate the surrounding environment having this “gap”, to the lifestyle of the client ( His hobby is playing contrabass.  And his wife’s is playing piano, which she plans to hold a small piano school as her two young daughters grow up and require less care.), and to the internal environment ( noise and heat created inside), within the small budget. 




Due to the budget, the house was build in a simplified plan, not by using some equipments or special materials.  Shinichiro set an “offensive area” where to have the active relation with the sunlight and the natural environment in a backyard, which is placed in the center of U-shaped “defensive area”.  The “offensive area” can be adjusted in its size for the different purposes and seasons, by opening and closing the doors, which are the entrance windbreak sliding doors or the wooden sashes facing the deck.  The sunlight comes through the wide opened toplight facing the woods.  By opening this toplight, the cool air from the river circulates through the wellholes during the summer.





During the winter, the wellholes are opened and used to heat up the second level only by using the heat from the floor heating on the first level.  In the “defensive area”, storages, laundry room, and restroom are located.  This area is a buffering zone for the heat environment of the “offensive area”, a tectonic zone where diagonal bracings of the shorter sides in the building gather, and a soundproofing zone that separates the noise from the traffic in front, and also prevents the instrument sound from leaking to neighborhood.   The outer wall of a red rust color makes the building and the green in background to stand out from each other by the complementary color effect.  The wall also stands out and shows the children “the place to return” in the white background, when the whole area is covered by the snow in the winter time.






via Akasaka Shinichiro Atelier

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