Back to Back House, Singapore

A multi-generational home designed to embody the spirit of community living at its core despite its small, long and narrow site. Building envelope control requirement provides an opportunity to re-define the spatial strategy of a multi-generational house where the building height is maximized to create multitude of spaces within the resultant space. Verticality becomes a design strategy to segregate and define different type of spaces with varying degree of privacy.

The challenges of the site where it is directly facing east west orientation gave us an opportunity to rethink the mainstream lexicons of Tropical Architecture while addressing the fundamental issues of our intense tropical rain and sun. Unlike many conventional houses, the house is designed to have 2 front elevations. There is no rear elevation in this house. This allows us to design the building elevations as a direct confrontation of the weather elements while maintaining a very interesting façade without adhering to the conventional architectural hierarchy of front and rear elevation. The external wall is constructed with double-layer brick walls to provide inherent heat insulation to the internal spaces. Top-hung windows are placed to be fully openable and allow for direct cross ventilation across the living spaces to ensure thermal comfort. Clients and visitors have often times felt pleasantly surprised and delighted that the temperature within the house is often times much cooler despite the heat outside.

The external facade also embraces the “after-effects” of the intense rain and sun where Singapore intense tropical climate often left buildings looking dilapidated after a few years. This is addressed via usage of vertical elements and recesses allowing for the streaking patterns of the tropical rains to be expressed as part of the building façade expression over time while the choice of mono-chromatic hues served as a blank canvas for these natural weathering processes to build layers of natural patina. In this way, the building seeks to remain as an architecture that remains timeless and resilient by engaging the “after-effects” of our tropical climate as part of its evolving architectural expression.