The bamboo façade of the house glows like a giant lantern.
The designers’ apartment above the studio has a small roof patio.
The Ahmett Salina House and Studio continues a long tradition in Southeast Asia of working from home, a sustainable practice that reduces transport costs and the use of non-renewable resources. The owners of the house are both graphic designers who required a small office/design studio to be integrated with their dwelling. The dialogue between the living and working areas is the essential driver of the brief. To preserve the privacy of the domestic area, vertical and horizontal zoning is introduced. The ground floor is designated as the working area/design studio and the upper floor as the living quarters for a small family. There is also a private area for the owners at the rear of the building. The front of the house, which overlooks a small landscaped public park, is designated the public zone.1
The “big idea” in the design is the horizontally hinged opening screen on the public façade, which allows the whole of the home-office to be opened up to the forecourt to create a huge indoor/outdoor space for social functions and academic events. The screen incorporates a “breathing skin” of cut bamboo sections, assembled without nails, that project out from a steel frame. This is an inspired climatic response employing sustainable material. Conceptually, the screen is seen as having “pores” that allow the house to breathe. Sunlight is filtered by the screen so that the internal temperature is lowered. The area between the screen and the house is used as a veranda and smoking area. Pradono is a passionate advocate of the use of bamboo, and other work by his practice exploring the use of this material has been published in international journals.2
The finished dwelling is frugal but is perfectly comfortable and it is an affordable replicable model for other young business partners. The ground floor is slightly cluttered with all the paraphernalia of a modern office—a glass-topped work table, a cluster of Apple Macintosh computers, a designer bicycle, the ubiquitous water dispenser and a customer/client reception area—together with a neon sign bidding staff and visitors to “Change yourself.” An open-riser staircase with cantilevered treads leads to the private zone, while the living and working spaces are visually connected by a void alongside the stair.
A double-height void links the two functions of residence and workspace.
The shared dining space.
The ground-floor design studio with access to the first-floor apartment.
First-floor plan of the designers’ apartment.
Detail of the bamboo screen that forms the front elevation.
The living accommodation is basic; a mattress on the floor recalls memories of a kampong lifestyle. There is space in the small patio at the rear of the house for a table and four chairs—and a frangipani tree. A neighboring first-floor balcony overlooks the space, which harks back to the concept of community found in village culture. At the front of the house, the façade has been pushed back to create a grass forecourt. A pergola spans the low metal gate at the boundary, and a concrete ramp gently ascends to the entrance.
A modest replacement of a former terrace house in a neighborhood that was originally constructed as part of a 1960s Sukarno-era Russian-designed master plan, the home-office was built on a tight budget. The architect has used considerable ingenuity in sourcing appropriate materials and in the elegant, if austere, detailing of the structure, the cladding and the internal finishes. A steel frame was employed for the house to speed up the construction process. The internal finishes are essentially unpainted plaster walls, polished cement and terrazzo floors, surface-mounted electrical conduit and exposed ducting, with, at first-floor level, an aluminum foil-insulated ceiling above exposed steel beams.
The house-cum-office is an appropriate base for one of Jakarta’s trendiest young graphic design firms. There are parallels in the design approach of Budi Pradono with other practitioners in Southeast Asia, including Singaporean architect Ling Hao and Malaysian architect Kevin Low. Pradono is now working worldwide, and ongoing projects include the Pure Shin Si Lin exhibition space and the Flora Building project, both in Taipei, Taiwan. His work has also been published in several books and journals.3
A sign that is a product of the design company.
A small patio at the rear of the house, with dining facilities for staff.
A narrow path leads to the house-studio entrance.
A horizontally hinged bamboo screen forms the entrance façade.
Footnotes
1 Budi Pradono in discussion with the author, October 25, 2009.
2 Catherine Slessor, “Balinese Bamboo,” The Architectural Review, December 2005, p. 84.
3 Katharina Feuer, Young Asian Architects, Cologne: Daab Publishers, 2006.