Half Is More – House in Progress

Project Name: Half is More – House in Progress
Authors: Shard Design

CITATION

In the past decade, a new set of emerging practices in India has been observed engaging with the peri-urban and rural contexts, places where the majority of India continues to live. Rural housing poses fundamentally different challenges, as issues of economy, appropriate materials, scale, comfort, and delight weigh on the project. In this project, the brief demands a part of the house to be built with the scheme accommodating a future expansion. In villages, people build when resources permit.

The clear and articulate plan of the house brings in the complexity and surprise through a section where spaces are designed around two courts. The forecourt offers a semi-public space, a social space for interaction and meeting. The private court has a climatic function, bringing light and ventilation to the sanctum of the house.

The architects have chosen to work with material and details that has an association to the site and context. By making allowances for the brick to be used in multiple forms, the surface becomes a uniting spatial element. The staggering brick silhouette ensures an alluring image of the structure without waste. The ornament is made. The contextual, yet contemporary structure reinterprets a courtyard house, and the gestures of strategically placed openings enable the growing plan and future connections.

Built richly with economy of means, this residence presents the vast opportunities for architectural explorations in rural contexts – places where the context challenges conventional urban strategies of design. Built to enhance the context, this house re-aligns the typological potentials of rural contexts with architectural innovation in space, surface, material and tectonics in service of enhancing quality of life and therefore, Half is More – House in Progress by Shard Design is awarded a Citation in The Merit List.