studio prAcademics: The Ring House is located in Jaspur, the northern suburb of Ahmedabad. While a water canal passes through the site’s southern edge, agricultural fields surrounds the rest of the sides. With water and green fields all around and more than 120 tress, predominantly Mango and Chickoo (Sapodilla) tress, the site as an abode for variety of birds, an important element of the biodiversity of the context. Proposed project is a weekend home for a large sized family, comprising of 14 members that includes 4 kids under 10 years.
As the site is in the midst of natural features, we intended to insert the built form carefully without tempering the existing set of feature and trees. We identified a zone with no fruit trees and tried to knead the compact built form, hence creating smaller built footprint. Site with varied contour levels, program evolved with landscape design integration with existing contours. Zone where the house was to come, has been elevated by 3 meters and conceived as a table with grown lawn areas. This elevated even table partially hosts the built form, while rest of the built areas is cantilevered.
Proposing the house on elevated level, provided numerous opportunities to the forecourt and house to be surrounded by thick foliage of the grown fruit trees, with birds roaming around frequently at arm’s length. The built form gets its inspiration from traditional village typology from Saurashtra region of Gujarat, where ‘faliyu’ – the forecourt is an open to sky entrance space, providing adequate light and ventilation, ‘osri’ – the linear verandah becomes the buffer space often used for informal seating space, circulation space and occasional sleeping area.
Kitchen and sleeping areas are arranged beyond the liner verandah to keep the privacy intact as well creating thermal comfort with controlled sunlight and ample ventilation. To create a compact form of this typology, the built mass took the circular ring form. Here, the circular entrance space ‘faliya’ becomes a place to gather with ample seating spaces, while allowing sky light to penetrate in through slits created by lifting up the circular roof. ‘Osri’ here serves it traditional purpose of circulation corridor, dividing the bedrooms, kitchen and dining area from the volume of living space.
As the brick cladded walls and layers of internal spaces circle around the living areas, hence forming the ring, the bulilt mass gets strategic perforations creating variety of view frames of naturally kept landscape from the internal spaces. Slant, saucer-like slab projection is designed to provide shading to the walls and openings.
We at sudio prAcademics enage ourselves to investigate the interraltion between human body’s dynamics and subtleness of spaces. General perception suggests that the space remains frozen and everything including human revolves around it. Very rarely, it happens the physical manifestation of human dynamics and space gets reversed, while space start revolving around everything else.
