1500 Haus

1500 HAUS

Architect: Studio Lawang
Design Team: Patrisius Marvin Dalimartha & Thomas Pradipta
Structural Engineer: Grand Optima Design
Contractor: PT Cahaya Kurnia Utama

The area on which the house was built is an area prone to flooding. The worse one was in January 2020, when it was flooded up to 1500mm inside the house. Hence the name 1500 Haus.

When the owner decided to renovate the existing house, the initial plan was to partially raise the house and to add an additional floor, in order to minimize the impact of flooding should it happen again in the future. But after several discussion, it is decided to rebuild the house from scratch. The consideration was: structural instability when adding an additional floor to the existing structure, the minimum result compares to spending a good amount of budget, and the non-ideal layout when only partial areas of the house were raised.

Following the decision, there are three problems that need to be addressed. First, the owner requested that the ground level of the house to be raised 2m from the original ground level. Second the plot faces west. And third, the budget to build this house is limited so careful material selection and reuse some of the existing house materials were the way to go.

The plot size is 7.5x20m. To have the ground level raised 2m from the original ground level presents 2 challenges: garage (car) and people access from the street level. In order to have an accessible garage, the car ramp need to be made longer than a typical row house ramp, which is usually only about 5m from the edge of the plot. In this design the ramp was made 9m long. People access was done using sets of steps that wraps around a rectangular planter box. This helps ease, the climbing from street level to the ground level, as the steps were divided into three sets of low-rise steps. The users will not see the end (ground level), until they reach the final sets of steps. The main entry door is also obscured from the street, to give a better privacy.

Natural lighting and ventilation are key elements in the design. Each room in the house have access to natural sunlight and ventilations by means of windows, openings and skylights. The front elevation has minimum openings due to its west facing orientation. The back of the plot was offset 2.5 m to provide extra sunlight, room for greeneries and making cross ventilation a possibility.