The space between two towering buildings on a Vietnam street becomes one big inhabitable plant trellis thanks to an unusual arrangement of space devised by local firm Block Architects. Looking up from the sidewalk, the new volume appears to have been inserted into an alleyway, occupying an interstitial space in a way that encourages the transmission of sunlight all the way from the neighboring rooflines to the ground level.
In fact, the architects took a structure that already existed and knocked out unnecessary walls and floors to create a series of voids divided by white grids that almost seem intangible at first glance, like a graphic overlay on top of a photograph. The clients wanted both a private residence and an office space for their business producing handcrafted leather fashion accessories, and in this, the architects found inspiration, mimicking the way thread connects separate pieces of textiles.
?Like meticulous craftsmen, we carefully joined up every part of the house: old ones and new ones, separate ones and shared ones, together with wood, brick, concrete, metal, and trees,? they explain. ?The house appears as if it were ‘sewed’ with thin, pure white thread, which fills us with excitement. Unnecessary walls and floors were removed to make space, exposing a large structure which was ‘sewed’ on walls alongside big frames at the front and the back of the house.?
The resulting frames are made of thin white metal rods arranged in a grids...