REGIONALITY

Keywords:

Sample
  1.Rajastan old city house
  2.American apartment
  3.Dharavi house
  4.Chinese laundry

Concept

  The discussion about regionality, nation's character is not just "elements" that can be easily recognized visually.It's something deeper, something hided in regional daily life, something related to climate, environment, history.It's a sociological and anthropological proposition.

 In this post, I will compare the basic house plans, and propose my understanding about the fundamental component in architecture which is the tenement.



As we can see from the picture above, lots of people are doing laundry in a public pool. It's a scene that can be seen in Dharavi everyday. Laundry as a daily activity, not like in other countries, is a irreplaceable public event for people who live in Dharavi. It also made me thinking about the "default status" in different regions.What we regarded obvious may be unacceptable to people from other district.Based on climate, environment, history and other regional facts, people created their own living program.Which deeply infected their architecture functions and forms.

Here's some examples.
In Indian Rajastan Old city, we can see that there's always a elevated platform in front of their front door, there are stairs from the platform to ground level, and on the small area between the loweast step and ground , there's a water pipe, people wash clothes there, along the roads.

It's a smart rearrange of basic functions of a home.
They kept bedrooms inside, and use the semi-public elevated platform as living room, laundry function have been throw out of the house and become a public sharing spaces.
This rearrangement shows their attitude of defining which can be shown to other people, can be open to public.Laundry in this case, have been chosen to be the public and sharing function, with laundry outside, they can have better bedrooms, since they have distribute "living room" and "laundry" outside.

Not just think of designing a single building but designing several as a group or a  component.
When we think of designing in groups, we can have more freedom in level spaces depends on needs and privacy.Which also related to different customs.

Compare this living component(grounp) in India, to an apartment building in Manhattan.We can find matches.Laundries have been separated from private rooms, and positioned in the basement, the whole building will share a lobby so they might be able to have a door man, that keep secure and take care of the mails.If the apartment doesn't have a laundry in basement, tenants would have to go to the laundry room nearby, which is the same strategy in India. The more you will to share, the cheaper the rent you would get.