The 8 box house was designed by PO Design – the architecture arm of Tierra Design and helmed by Franklin Po.
From the exterior, the house – located at the northern end of the Lien site – appears as a cluster of eight white cubic volumes of different sizes and orientations: in the context of the Lien Villas Collective, it can be seen as a hybrid, somewhere in between the design approaches taken by Ministry of Design and Zarch.
The massing was arrived through a long process of design exploration, in which different configurations were tested and design decisions were carefully deliberated and rationalized. The starting point was, however, quite a straightforward one: a response to the original Lien colonial bungalow, which the designers saw as a black-and-white colonial bungalow that could be reinterpreted in an uncompromisingly modern manner.
By looking at the design process of the 8-Box House, one could note that by transforming the black-and-white bungalow type into an archetypal house-form, the designers might have unwittingly overlooked certain socially and culturally specific formal features of the blackand white bungalow, such as the verandah and the three-bay-spatial-configuration, in order to maintain the purity and simplicity of the archetypal form.
The windows are all square shaped,with the larger ones are sub-divided into four smaller squares with mullions and transoms, and the surfaces of the cubic volumes are detailed to appear as flat as possible: the metallic roofs appear on the vertical surfaces minimally as thin drip-edges, and the window sills are reduced to razor-thin white-painted horizontal elements that extrude minimally from the surfaces. Franklin Po observes that, if it had been possible, he would have removed the standing seams of the metallic roofs so that they could be totally flat and planar.
The final design of the 8-Box House might not bear any resemblance to the original black-and-white bungalow type, which the architects sought to reinterpret at the beginning of the process, but the exploration into the clustering of archetypal forms led to an outcome that is uncompromisingly modern and refreshingly different from any other house in Singapore.
All images : Photos© SGLivingPod by Amir Sultan
Text : The Lien Villas Collective , No Boundaries.
