135 Bishan
about
The client approached us with a request for an industrial themed design. “We are a very messy family. Anything too refined will just be destroyed by our lifestyle.” We decided to derive our design aesthetics more from the site context, rather than falling into trendy terms of “industrial”.
The design is a deliberate play of tension and contrast between materials and forms to bring out the clashing messiness akin to industrial spaces. The ceiling is an orthogonal grid of exposed electrical conduits with exposed light bulbs as illumination, this is because of HDB requirement.
The floor is intentionally a rotated diagonal grid using terracotta tiles that can be found all around Bishan area, be it the floor or the roof of the HDB flats. An elaborate carpentry that housed all the programmatic requirement is sandwiched between the 2 grids, using a very textured OSB board material, capturing sunlight or artificial lighting during different times of the day. Archways and cabinet openings are deliberately asymmetrical in form to emphasize the tension throughout the whole apartment space.
January 2017
