The Red Roof

The project is a small house in an area of ​​80m2. The site is located on the main road of the village. Urbanization has changed the architecture and living space of this village. New houses with styles that one can easily find in big cities have disrupted their familiar landscape and lifestyle. The house is meant for a married couple over 50 who has been living in this rural area since they were born. In the search of a new appropriate typology for the context, we are convinced that adapting the new architecture based on the traditional cultural lifestyle of the couple is the most important task.

Vegetable garden, playground and connecting space.Connecting with nature, daily activities are gardening, paddy drying, etc. Vegetable gardens and multi-purpose playgrounds become the soul of houses in this village. In a small site, the ground floor needs a lot of complex functions, including bicycle repair space, living room, kitchen, traditional outdoor wood stove, bedrooms, toilets, paddy drying yards, rice warehouse, chicken yard, etc. We proposed small courtyards in the front, middle and back of the house, to connect indoor spaces with nature. 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. On the mezzanine floor, there is a small yard connected to the yard in the middle of the house.



The rooftop garden is adjacent to the courtyard of the mezzanine floor, creating a playground & vegetable garden that connects from the roof to the ground floor. The products from the garden go directly to everyday meals, fresh and always available. The couple has 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. The rooftop garden also has the role of insulating the house. The internal temperature is significantly reduced compared to the corrugated steel roof.

Rural architectural typology. In Vietnamese traditional landscape, “the red roof” house represented for a time of regional local architecture. However, now new multi-story houses with steel roofs seem to have lost the identity of the village landscape. The stair-step method reduces the height of the façade, helps urban space is not overwhelmed and creates a comfortable slope. This establishes the communication between the space on the roof and the space under the road. “The red roof” has the intent to keep, store and remind the familiar rural lifestyle.

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