POSTS PORTFOLIO SEARCH SHOP
Your address will show here +12 34 56 78
Status

Unbuilt

Date

2018

Location

Jeddah, KSA

Team

Fouad Samara
Lara Alam
Maya Zreik

Cookie-cutter housing

The overwhelming majority of single family housing in Saudi Arabia are detached villas surrounded by 3.5m high fences arranged either side of a street. There is almost no interaction with the street or public spaces, except for a pedestrian and sometimes car gate.

 

This archetype leads to inward looking properties with a built mass in the center and mediocre gardens all round often dictated by setbacks. Imagine suburban cookie-cutter housing also fenced in!

Yin-yang massing

From the start, the owners for this villa wanted something different. They wanted to be welcomed into their property by a garden and not by a defensive wall. They wanted the garden to be present in the entire experience of their home.

Intuitively, the first sketch generated split the property in a yin-yang relationship between the garden and the area allocated for construction. The garden would occupy the entire street front and skew back to a single point; the built form occupying the rear edge of the site and tapering to a point along the street front. The line between the garden and the built part of the property developed into a ‘fuzzy edge’ blurring the garden and the interior of the house.

Invading the house

With the creation of this ‘fuzzy edge’, the garden invaded the house. The house, in turn, invaded the garden. Self referential spaces are created within the house where one would experience the inside and the outside of spaces at once. Along the street, the property will be a welcomed anomaly. A bit of garden within a walled street. The house will vaguely be visible with it.

The Trellis

The glazed ‘fuzzy edge’ of the house, between inside and out, adopts a trellis that articulates in layering the façade and provides an armature for the garden climbers. Designed at the same time the Smithson’s iconic Robin Hood Gardens was being demolished, the trellis pays homage to Peter Smithson’s unbuilt Yellow House.