Pott House

Project Name: Pott House
Authors: Kiron Cheerla Architecture Design

CITATION

Architects are complicit in perpetuating the typology of a gated private residence. While typologically, this project works within a similar framework, it pushes back to challenge the cliche through its unique materiality, structural logic and spatial quality. The site is enclosed by a tall wall with a garden within. The house and the outhouse frame the walled garden, with the gate designed to make a gesture of the connection to the street.

Timber is limited by nature in its structural spanning capabilities. Designed on a dense orthogonal grid, the house takes on the challenge of design with timber and pushes the possible boundaries of the material for the interior space by imagining and invoking the structure and the internal spatial quality simultaneously. While timber dictates the spans and the sizes of the rooms, it is used to create a large internal volume and a unique roof form that works towards creating a climatically compatible frame. This, along with the garden, makes the house comfortable – a sanctuary within the city.

The logic of the plan continues into the furniture, and an inventive control of ventilation is designed for the air to move through the tunnel-like form. The ‘technology’ of making is thus protracted to encompass the tactile, layered experience of the building. The large internal volume is broken down, and the hidden garden becomes a place for quietude and delight.

In a time when one encounters exceedingly large houses, built within private enclaves, this project proposes an approach where ideas of scale, technology, privacy and seclusion are mitigated through the materiality and making. The structure deeply engages with a material to create a humane space to live, all the while pushing the envelope of its structural and visual possibilities, and therefore, Pott House by Kiron Cheerla Architecture Design is awarded a Citation in The Merit List.