Traversing Concrete on Peatland
What is luxury? Most of the time luxury houses are embodied in its scale, expensive materials, even high technology facilities, commonly reproduced; it becomes a certain archetype of “luxury” estranged from everydayness. Unused clean kitchen, pile of clothes, to the dust on aesthetic difficult corners are the result of this estrangement. This project of a luxury house on peatland in Palangkaraya was our tackle on how to design the familiar everydayness of owners in their personalised social-cultural taste?
Footwear is the embodied spatio-temporality sequences that we sense on our client's everydayness. As the public figures on locals, the everyday life of clients extend from their private life to public, whether it is formal or even extra formal, on the rhythm of regular and irregularities. The footwear they are using (or any related user) is the organisation of the spatial practice; when and where it is used is about what kind of activities occur in place to the rest attribution in use, like hijab or not. On their fairly dynamic social life, this footwear flow on trans-sequential continuance that responded by design though transitional space as a pause for interlude. The footwear manages the relationality of indoor and outdoor, traversing the spectrum of the anthropogenic space to the wilderness on the landscape.
This building is situated on the urban peatland (gambut) landscape, relatively on the outskirts of ongoing urbanisation in the city. While most of the development response to peatland is by filling the peat surpassing the road elevation, this design tries to explore a more sustainable yet less intrusive conclusion. Using the ecology landscape approach, this design manages the site area in patch classifications, expanding from human areas to amphibi to peat. The landscape is designed in through water cycle parameters, replying the concern of surface water on urban flooding due to the poor city peatland hydrological system management.
So the landscape design is the space design itself, integrated to the programming of the house which results in multiple masses building. The buildings are formed in rectangular orientation on the north-south side, with openings to maximize airflow that has been situated by landscape, while also flexible to be enclosed in the context of smoke haze from peat wildfires. On the intensive living area, located on the second floor, the opening elements were designed through climate responsive iteration. These openings also iterate with the parameter of view, landscape, and privacy, in the purpose of spatial experience of thermal comfort, hijab privacy, operable, and wide orientation of scenery.
The scenery with a big opening is one accentuation from clients in the conjunction of their social status, cultural taste, and home aspirations. This design aestheticised the peat landscape, forming the house as the chill harborage around the scorching surroundings. Materiality explores on stones like travertine, terrazzo, to the concrete variations, giving the sensation of ‘cool tiles of the mosque floor’. There is also rammed concrete which we are experimenting with to the gradation of red water of peat, yellow sand on the locals, and the general process of concrete construction. This house design tries to embody luxury by the composition, personalisation, openness, scenery, and perception of uncannily familiar.
