The house is in a cooperative community housing located adjacent to a public garden in one of the old neighborhoods of Surat City. As urban centers expand, the predominant typology of high-rise housing takes over greenfield lands.
Project Name: Tetris Garden
Studio Name: ROOMOOR
Project Location: Surat, Gujarat, India
Completion Year: 2023
Gross Built Area (m2): 650m2
Principal partner: Mahendra Gusain
Design Partner: Dhruv Gusain
Photo Credits: Dhrupad Shukla, Jainee Gusain
Breaking away from this norm, the homeowners – a multi-generational family of 7, decided to relocate just one lot away from their home of 30+ years and thus retain the social ties with the neighborhood community.
Program:
Built on a footprint of 12X12 meters, a diverse programmatic requirement of three generations of the family proved to be an exercise in housing for density and incremental growth. The goal was to provide freedom to each family member under an overview of affordability and longevity.
Ideation:
The house sits at a cul-de-sac and shares a boundary with a public garden managed by the city council. This in-betweenness found in the context is an opportunity to ideate a new low-rise high-density hybrid by merging the array of the vertical tall trees and the horizontal row housing.
Design:
The house is deconstructed into individual rooms and organized like a three-dimensional Tetris, floating on a grid of columns. The cardinal sun path and climate inform the positioning of these rooms and introduce strategic voids like balconies and terraces while capturing the essential garden foliage. The composition of these individual break-out spaces creates an interactive outdoor edge overlooking the landscape. The house thus becomes a portal to this borrowed landscape garden.
The foliage-like rooms wrap around a naturally lit central void akin to the trunk of a tree. A yellow Jaisalmer sandstone-clad staircase runs along this light well. The canonical rooms open to their respective covered balconies, providing shade in the tropical climate. The wind from the shaded balconies flows through the space while the hot air rises into the central void due to the funnel effect.
An empty room, a quintessential pavilion on the terrace overlooks the garden.
