Articles by Thuto Vilakazi

Objective – Initially, due to the deterioration of the original two-story Thai-style house and the advanced age of the house’s foundation, it was hard to fix. Additionally, the family was growing, and they required more private space, including for their son who was starting his own family. Therefore, the owner thought they should just build a new house and move somewhere else. However, after the architect visited the site and had a conversation with the owner, they realized that the owner still had a lot of emotional attachment to the old house. This was due to memories that spanned 60 years of the owner’s life, during which he had lived in the house built by his own father’s hand. Therefore, the architect came up with the idea of “re-composition” – reassembling the architectural pieces of the old house to create a new piece of architecture that would satisfy the family’s need for expanded functionality, and living space while still reflecting the lifestyle, usage patterns, and atmosphere of the old house.

The monochromatic house was built on a flat plot, with an entrance from the south side, in the urbanizing part of Świerczyniec. The L-shaped layout of the building makes the garden zone hidden from the street. The layout of the building is rotated according to the directions of the world. Thanks to it, the garden zone with the terrace is exposed to sunlight earlier.

The plot is located on the edge of the settlement with transition to agricultural green areas, isolated industrial facilities, and highways. The compact volume of the house appears closed to the street.  The asymmetrical gable roof acts as a borrowing from the traditional residential houses in the immediate vicinity.

Yangnar Studio is a group of skilled craftsmen and architects who design and build the work through the local methodology of architecture. With background and respect in indigenous and vernacular architecture in Northern Thailand, their Project is developed through deep consideration of place and practice that draw from traditional craftsmanship skills, local building techniques, the nature of each material, and ingenuity arising from limited resources. The essence of the work lies in the human experience through the skill of the local builder team that tries to both involve each craftsmanship that is related to the site context and always improve the development of the skill that shows up in the process with the local construction unit.

We’ve purchased the 33-year-old condominium with views of the Koto Canal in three directions and renovated the four-bedroom unit into a one-room unit that integrates work and residence. The plan was to overlap the living and working areas rather than separating, and the nine fittings that appeared, as a result, were treated like a canvas for a “fusuma (sliding door)” painting. This 33-year-old condominium surveys the canal on the south, west, and north sides. The former four-bedroom unit was renovated into a one-room unit that integrates work and residence. 

A shared studio was created in the space of former medical practices in a cultural heritage building in the square in Frýdek-Místek. We created a multifunctional space with a hair salon, an architectural-sculptural studio, and a residential floor using our own resources. The main elements are wooden structures made from low-cost materials such as roof battens, spruce boards, polycarbonate, and steel profiles. Since we realized the interior for ourselves, many elements and details were created during construction.

The house sits on top of hills, with 270 degrees clear view of the skyline. The landscape of grass, stones, shrubs, and the abundance of trees is the first element of architecture proposed to the client from the very beginning of the design stages.

House for a Sculptor is a domestic gallery and retreat. Our clients had been living in the property for over 20 years before we were engaged to develop a design for the renovation. At this time, they had fashioned a series of structures at the rear of the property that we were to replace with a more permanent solution. Our challenge was to instill/embed the memory of some of these elements in the new design through measures such as recycling all bricks on site and salvaging original sandstone footings to use as landscape elements.

The kindergarten takes place in Saint Louis’s hospital in the 10th district of Paris. Located in a heritage area, the project is established on a 350m2 plot, next to an existing kindergarten for hospital staff with a garden that will be shared between the two structures and will host 48 cribs. As the city of Paris requested the building to be dismountable, the architects have opted for dry construction methods and prefabricated wooden structures and dismountable assemblies, allowing a possible deconstruction and future reuse of the building on another site.

This live-work unit is for a young family of four to carry out their home business of a spa and raise the kids. Despite being constrained by a small building footprint and compact program, the living space is designed to feel open and airy with fewer walls. The design concept is to create a path that allows the user to stroll from space to space, traveling up, down, and around the atrium. The vertical expansion of space through the atrium is intended to add the time effect that will shape the experience of the walk.