HOT, WET + NOISY THE EQUATORIAL ARCHITECTURE OF OUR OWN HOUSE

Guest critics, lecturers and consultants

Erik L’Heureux

Florian Schaetz

Oscar Carracedo

Tan Beng Kiang

Eddie Lau

Aurel von Richthofen (FCL)

Adrianne Joergensen (FCL)

Guo Xiao Wei

Anirudh Chandar

Jason Tan

Iven Peh

Joel Tay

Azizul Izwan B Roslan

Philip Wang (Structural)

Lim Shin Tarn (M&E)

Acknowledgements:

We would like to thank the above individuals in providing valuable advice and guidance throughout our design studio. This publication would not have been possible without their dedication and patience.

Content

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Precedents

Golconde Dormitory, Pondicherry

by George Nakashima, Antonin Raymond

KNUST Library, Kumasi

by James Cubitt and Partners

Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism Center, São Paulo

by João Batista Vilanova Artigas

Former U.S. Embassy building, Accra by Harry Weese Associates School

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Content

Proposals

Golconde Dormitory, Pondicherry, India (1945)

by AntoninRaymond&GeorgeNakashima

The Golconde dormitory in Pondicherry, India (1945) was commissioned by the Sri Aurobindo ashram spiritual community – followers of Sri Aurobindo, a controversial former-independence-activist-now-turned-guru who preached inner peace and tranquillity – to create a silent, contemplative space of meditation for its adherents in the hot, wet and noisy Pondicherry atmosphere.

Colonial Pondicherry was segmented by the French into two sections: The exclusive French quarter, a haven for the affluent colonists and their political allies, and Ville Noire (directly translated to English as ‘Blacktown’). Due to a growing unease within the French government at the increasing influence of the teachings of the Sri Aurobindo spiritual community amongst the colonists, the ashramites were forbidden from building their dormitory in the French quarter, with their large houses and grand verandahs – they were forced to site the building in the noisier, bustling, squalid and less ordered Ville Noire, where the majority of the locals lived.

Antonin Raymond and George Nakashima, the project architects, were thus faced with a conundrum: The architectural programme of a spiritual community behoves a noise-sensitive building, yet there was no alternative but to place the building in noisy ‘Blacktown’. This central paradox informed many of Raymond and Nakashima’s architectural decisions that went into the design of Golconde.

A Series of Layers

The building of Golconde is almost violently oriented north-south despite the harsh gridiron alignment of the roads in Ville Noire, which run in the north-easterly and south-westerly directions. The lattice-like right-angled logic of the streets and its buildings is immediately disrupted by this architectural intervention – yet this gesture is not a frivolous one, the building volume is now positioned perfectly to minimise direct solar heat gain, with its main façades now facing away from the tropical sun and calibrated towards the prevailing breeze directions. In order to rotate the building in this manner, the building is purposefully set back from the main roads that surround it on the north, east and west. Furthermore, the plot is also defined by the placement of a tall concrete wall that runs uniformly along the periphery.

Within the space betwixt the aforementioned concrete barrier and the building itself is a densely vegetated garden complete with reflecting pools.

The interior programmatic layout of the building is simple: a sole central stair core provides vertical access to the upper levels in each wing where the bedrooms are located. In each wing, a main corridor on the north façade serves as the only circulation pathway; the rooms are subservient to this linear geometry, being attached to the sides of the aforementioned corridor. In turn, the rooms have fenestrations that open towards vistas of the southern garden and beyond. This interior strategy results in quiet rooms that are placed as far away from the noisy northern face of the building (which is nearest the vehicular road) as possible.

As a whole, the building can be understood architecturally as a series of atmospheric filters that, when aggregated, work together to mitigate various climatic undesirables of the Pondicherry atmosphere.

First of all, the perimeter walls deflect a significant amount of incident noise from the busy road, being an opaque and thick barrier. The next layer of the garden further mitigates sound through dense foliage and distance, while also acting as a cooling measure against direct solar heat gain. The building façade, articulated as operable asbestos cement louvres, form the third climatic barrier against sound, rain and heat. Woven teak sliding doors that provide access to the bedrooms form the next line of defence, along with the width of the corridors as a buffer. Even when privacy is required and these doors are shut, a glass sliding window can be opened above the doors to create an aperture for air to pass through. Finally, the windows in each room allow the filtered atmosphere to then exit the building.

The main architectural strategy of Golconde can thus be described as a sort of climatic filtering engine that creates a pleasant microclimate in the interior. The rejection of the road edge as a design element, coupled with the erection of the perimeter wall, results in significant noise dampening by the time the outside sound reaches the building. Hot, wet and noisy concerns are all alleviated through the composite layers whilst the breeze is allowed to permeate the building.