Project Description
The project is a small house on an area of 80m2 in Quang Ngai, Vietnam. This is a rural area with difficult living conditions with hot weather and sometimes there are long rainy and flood seasons.
The house is meant for a married couple over 50s who has been living in this rural area since they were born. Connecting with nature, daily activities are gardening, paddy drying, chicken breeding etc.
In a small site, the house needs a lot of complex functions. Instead of having a large yard like other houses in the village, we create many courtyards with different heights, suitable for the height of the house structure. The products from the garden go directly to everyday meals, fresh and always available. The couple have happy hours together growing their own food, and a lot of times, sharing their products with the neighbor families, unexpectedly, the architecture has been generating community social interactions as its by-product. Specially, during the rainy season, there is still food available.
Rooftop garden also have a role to insulate the house. The internal temperature is significantly reduced compared to the corrugated steel roof. Besides, a green covering structure of the roof reduce heat radiation to the environment. Combined with the 2-layer wall, there are ventilation openings on the wall and courtyards with natural lighting, so the house is always airy.
In Vietnamese traditional landscape, the red terracotta houses represented for a time of regional local architecture. However, urbanization has changed the architecture and living space of this village. Now new multi-story houses with steel roofs seem to have lost the identity of the village landscape. So project “THE RED ROOF” has the intent to keep, store and remind the familiar rural lifestyle.