Hasta La Ideas

Caged balconies provide open-air corridors that are sheltered from harsh sunlight and tropical rain at this school in Vietnam by architects Vo Trong Nghia.

Vertical concrete louvres and perforated screens create the cage-like facade, which shades the corridors from direct sunlight whilst letting in the breeze.

The entire school is contained within a single five-storey building to keep both students and teachers dry during the rainy summer season.

The walls of the building are curved to snake around two courtyards and the roof slopes up gradually from the ground to the top floor.

Binh Duong School is located in the town of Di An, just north of Ho Chi Minh City, and provides teaching facilities for up to 800 junior and high school students.

The school is nominated for an award at this year’s World Architecture Festival, alongside a house with a vertical garden on its facade by the same architects.

See more schools on Dezeen »

Photography is by Hiroyuki Oki.

Here’s a project description sent by Vo Trong Nghia:

Binh Duong School by Vo Trong Nghia + Shunri Nishizawa + Daisuke Sanuki

Binh Duong, a new city which is 30 minutes away from Ho Chi Minh City, has a typical tropical climate all year round. The site is located in the middle of a flourishing forest with a wide variety of green and fruits, running rampant. This is where folks spending their time under the shade of trees. To pursuit a beautiful life, people are in harmony with the nature, making the border between the inside and the outside ambiguously. From the very first impression of the site, we tried to embed the building into the site by delivering this Vietnam-oriented generous spirit of natural land into the school design, which will eventually have 800 students.

The building is located in 5300 square meters abundant land, consisting of a maximum height of five levels, with the intention of being surrounded by the height of the forest around. Pre cast concrete louvers and pattern walls are used for envelop of the building. These shading devices generate semi-outside space, these open circumstances avoiding direct sunlight as well as acting like a natural ventilation system for the corridor space. All the classrooms are connected by this semi-open space, where teachers and students chatting, communicating and appreciating nature.

We designed the school as a continuous volume in order not to disturb any school activities. This fluidity concept is inspired by the endless raining of the typical tropical climate, where raining season lasts from May to November each year.

This continuous volume has a gentle slope surrounding the two courtyards as a geographical hill, lessens the aggressive height between the building and the peaceful site.

The school is designed as an S shape, connected to the ground at one end, curving around two courtyards with two different characteristics. Front yard is used for public space, serving for formal events such as meetings of the school. Backyard is more private, where students spend their personal time.

Teacher rooms; gym, laboratory and library are located around the front yard, while common students’ classrooms are arranged around the back yard. The open space flows throughout the circulation to help teachers and students enjoy various activities of the two courtyards with rich natural surroundings.

Thus, we intended this school to be borderless between the school activity and surrounding nature and also not to destroy the current abundant forest as much as possible. In this open school, students enjoy their life learning the generous spirits of nature. This is our alternative proposal for school design in Vietnam.

Site plan – click above for larger image

Floor plans – click above for larger image

Section – click above for larger image

South elevation – click above for larger image

East elevation – click above for larger image

The post Binh Duong School
by Vo Trong Nghia appeared first on Dezeen.

A dozen layers of concrete planters create a vertical garden on the facade of this house in Ho Chi Minh City by Vietnamese architects Vo Trong Nghia.

Built for a couple and one of their mothers, the building is 20m deep but just 4m wide, typical of the narrow but long ‘tube houses’ common in Vietnam.

Concrete planters span between the side walls to cover the front and back facades, and are spaced according to the height of the plants.

At the rear of the house, an exterior staircase is positioned between the planters and the back wall, while glazing separates the front of the house from the plants.

Automatic irrigation pipes fitted inside the planters allow for easy watering and maintenance.

A rooftop garden provides shelter from the noise and pollution of the streets below.

Inside the house, there are few partition walls in order to maximise views of the green facades and encourage ventilation. The rooflights also allow natural light to penetrate.

Sunlight pokes through the leaves of the plants to cast dappled shadows on the granite walls.

Photographs are by Hiroyuki Oki.

See more stories from Vietnam »

Here’s some more text from the architects:

Project Name: Stacking Green
Location: Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam
Completion: 2011

Architect’s Name: Vo Trong Nghia + Daisuke Sanuki + Shunri Nishizawa
Contractor: Thuan Viet Company + Wind and water House JSC.
Floor area: 250m2 (4 floors)

Whoever wanders around Saigon, a chaotic city with the highest density of population in the world, can easily find flower-pots cramped and displayed here and there all around the streets.

This interesting custom has formed the character of Saigon over a long period of time and Saigonese love their life with a large variety of tropical plants and flowers in their balconies, courtyards and streets.

The house, designed for a thirty-year-old couple and their mother, is a typical tube house constructed on the plot 4m wide and 20m deep.

The front and back facades are entirely composed of layers of concrete planters cantilevered from two side walls.

The distance between the planters and the height of the planters are adjusted according to the height of the plants, which varies from 25 cm to 40 cm.

To water plants and for easy maintenance, we use the automatic irrigation pipes inside the planters.

We named this tropical, unique and green house “Stacking Green” because its façades filled with vigorous and vital greenery.

Click above for larger image

The house structure is an RC frame structure widely used in Vietnam. The partition walls are very few in order to keep interior fluency and view of green façades from every point of the house.

During the day we get the varying light with the time of day trimmed by the top-light in the centre.

In the morning and the afternoon, the sunlight enters through the amount of leafs on both façades, creating beautiful shadow effects on the granite walls, which are composed of strictly stacked 2cm stones.

The green façade and roof top garden protect its inhabitants from the direct sunlight, street noise and pollution. Furthermore, natural ventilation through the façades and 2 top-lights allow this house to save a big energy in a harsh climate in Saigon.

Concerning these ecological approaches, we referred a lot to the bioclimatic principles of traditional Vietnamese courtyard house.

In this chaotic city, we defined the full variety of surrounding greenery as a context of Saigon and applied to the main concept of this house.

Although the Saigon townscape is getting uniformed and boring under the influence of the furious urban sprawl of recent years, we intended this house to inspire people to re-define and re-increase the greenery as the character of this city.

“Stacking Green” is just one small house, but it is generated from the context of Saigon. We hope that “Stacking Green” makes Saigon become more distinguished and fascinating with much more tropical greenery in the future.

The post Stacking Green
by Vo Trong Nghia appeared first on Dezeen.

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