Green Architecture by Vo Trong Nghia

With all the emphasis on the building green movement it was really great to find this article at Dezeen about an architect in Vietnam who was going all out in green friendly housing.

Borrowing on old city philosophy but using modern architecture, technology, and materials Vo Trong Nghia built Stacking Green.

I Thought  I’d throw in this pic of some other work by Mr. Nghia, it’s pretty cool. I love that bamboo look, the symbiotic nature of cafe and water, and the trees on the mini islands. Looks like a great place to have a meal.

Here’s a direct link to the firms website, where you can look at it in English, at least it’s set up that way, but I did have a few problems when I switched over to an English translation, and it’s heavy flash, fwiw. There are some great images there, so if you have an interest-take a look.

Here is the story below on the Stacking Green apartment. You’ll find if you go through all the images you will get to architectural drawings and plans which really tell the process and background of the design of this project. A nice article and well done by Dezeen.

To fit my blog I formatted some of the images differently than the article(also added a few comments via captions directly under images), cleaned up the links and added a few. The original link to the photographer took me to a dead page so I linked to another page of his images of a Nghia project.

Take a look.

A dozen layers of concrete planters create a vertical garden on the facade of this house in Ho Chi Minh City by Vietnamese architects Vo Trong Nghia.

Built for a couple and one of their mothers, the building is 20m deep but just 4m wide, typical of the narrow but long ‘tube houses’ common in Vietnam.

Concrete planters span between the side walls to cover the front and back facades, and are spaced according to the height of the plants.

At the rear of the house, an exterior staircase is positioned between the planters and the back wall, while glazing separates the front of the house from the plants.

Automatic irrigation pipes fitted inside the planters allow for easy watering and maintenance.

A rooftop garden provides shelter from the noise and pollution of the streets below.

Inside the house, there are few partition walls in order to maximise views of the green facades and encourage ventilation. The rooflights also allow natural light to penetrate.

Sunlight pokes through the leaves of the plants to cast dappled shadows on the granite walls.

Photographs are by Hiroyuki Oki.

See more stories from Vietnam »

Here’s some more text from the architects:

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Project Name: Stacking Green
Location: Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam
Completion: 2011

Architect’s Name: Vo Trong Nghia + Daisuke Sanuki + Shunri Nishizawa
Contractor: Thuan Viet Company + Wind and water House JSC.
Floor area: 250m2 (4 floors)

Whoever wanders around Saigon, a chaotic city with the highest density of population in the world, can easily find flower-pots cramped and displayed here and there all around the streets.

This interesting custom has formed the character of Saigon over a long period of time and Saigonese love their life with a large variety of tropical plants and flowers in their balconies, courtyards and streets.

The house, designed for a thirty-year-old couple and their mother, is a typical tube house constructed on the plot 4m wide and 20m deep.

The front and back facades are entirely composed of layers of concrete planters cantilevered from two side walls.

The distance between the planters and the height of the planters are adjusted according to the height of the plants, which varies from 25 cm to 40 cm.

To water plants and for easy maintenance, we use the automatic irrigation pipes inside the planters.

We named this tropical, unique and green house “Stacking Green” because its façades filled with vigorous and vital greenery.

Click above for larger image

The house structure is an RC frame structure widely used in Vietnam. The partition walls are very few in order to keep interior fluency and view of green façades from every point of the house.

During the day we get the varying light with the time of day trimmed by the top-light in the centre.

In the morning and the afternoon, the sunlight enters through the amount of leafs on both façades, creating beautiful shadow effects on the granite walls, which are composed of strictly stacked 2cm stones.

The green façade and roof top garden protect its inhabitants from the direct sunlight, street noise and pollution. Furthermore, natural ventilation through the façades and 2 top-lights allow this house to save a big energy in a harsh climate in Saigon.

Concerning these ecological approaches, we referred a lot to the bioclimatic principles of traditional Vietnamese courtyard house.

In this chaotic city, we defined the full variety of surrounding greenery as a context of Saigon and applied to the main concept of this house.

Although the Saigon townscape is getting uniformed and boring under the influence of the furious urban sprawl of recent years, we intended this house to inspire people to re-define and re-increase the greenery as the character of this city.

“Stacking Green” is just one small house, but it is generated from the context of Saigon. We hope that “Stacking Green” makes Saigon become more distinguished and fascinating with much more tropical greenery in the future.

♦The article is at Dezeen, a excellent site, full of wonderful articles, information and all things design. Images with links to two articles below.