ASA Journal 05/22

AT HOME WITH THE TREES
87
Shophouses are omnipresent in Southeast Asian
towns and cities for their spatial functionality that
integrates commercial and living spaces into one
building. Most shophouses are commonly designed
for commercial activities to take place at the front
of the building’s ground floor, which is clearly
separated from the living quarters. Nevertheless,
this type of building in Vietnam often comes with a
floor plan where floor levels are used to divide the
two functional spaces, which is the kind of architectural
program that can be dated back to the 19th
Century. From the owner’s brief, the ground and
underground floor of Bat Trang House would be
used as the showroom for the products from the
family’s business. The remaining four floors above
are designed into the living quarter, comprising
five bedrooms, a kitchen, restrooms, and the living
spaces for the seven members of the family with
the rooftop housing an outdoor pool and a room
where ancestral shrines are placed.
One of Vo Trong Nghia’s architectural
signatures is a connection
between humans’ living experiences
and nature, which reveals itself in
spaces where real trees and plants
are grown, assimilating the green
elements as an inseparable attribute
of the house.
7
One of the must-haves in Vo Trong Nghia’s architectural
signature is a facilitated connection
between humans’ living experiences and nature,
which reveals itself in the form of spaces where
real trees and plants are grown, assimilating the
green elements as an inseparable attribute of the
house. Fortunately, Bat Trang House is one of the
projects where both the architect and owner share
the same adoration for green space. While most of
his works originate from the same core principle,
Vo Trong Nghia Architects has taken a different
approach to how each project is designed. One of
the houses in the House for Trees series such as
Stacking Green (2011) sees layers of growing trees
superimposed and shown as the building’s skin
while Pot Plant House (2014) in Ho Chi Minh, which
is built on a limited plot of land, conceives structures
that look like a bunch of oversized bamboo
plant pots with trees growing on the roof. For this
shophouse in Bat Trang, Vo Trong Nghia Architects
takes a similar approach to what they did with Ha
Long Villa completed earlier in the same year with
the presence of green spaces between the building
shell and boundary of the interior living spaces.
What sets the two projects apart, however, are details
of the functional program and materials used
for the building envelopes.