Mountain House
Nestled in the Hantana mountain range that forms the southern edge of the Kandyan valley, this three-bedroom house is a rebirth of an old, single-storey dwelling that was leftover at the site to be demolished and pave the way for new residential construction. Isolated among the tea bushes of its plantation land, the old house was a monolithic rectangle of tight spaces, dark rooms, flat ceilings and dilapidated building portions; neither was it acknowledging the stunning views of the hills bordering the plantation, nor did it have interiors pleasant enough to live and enjoy. Tearing down this derelict building was indeed an inevitability to happen.
Peeling off the plaster of the existing walls of the old building, however, opened up a startling revelation and a point of departure for the subsequent design thinking—the thick, old walls were made out of randomly-placed and irregular-shaped stonework held together by a mud mortar, a technique that is common to building practised in the nearby mountain villages. It was then decided to retain and express the textural formation of the old stones walls, around which a new spatial system of different volumes, uses, experiences and journeys were conceived. This idea of keeping the old stone walls responded to multiples outcomes: (1) the environmental and economic gains of adaptive reuse; (2) the recycling of resources; (3) the experiential rewards of acknowledging local material practices inhabiting the memory of the place; and (4) the constructional benefits of following a building language that supports the use of local craft.
The phasing of the construction at the site followed a strategy that reversed the typical bottom-up building process. Instead, a large overhanging steel roof on a two-storey, GI tube structural skeleton—supported on pad footings and placed almost independently to the retained, stone walls—was the first to be built, after having demolished the old roof and the dilapidated building components. This was then followed by the placing of the upper-level timber floor decks to organically span between the old walls and the new steel columns; the objective here was to carve out internal volumes underneath the large horizontal surface hovering above. New stone walls on strip foundations were then introduced at ground level to define new spatial geometries while complementing the old walls; these were built along with the detailed window projections that frame the landscape beyond. The erection of the lath-and- plaster walls to complete the building envelope was pursued next, followed
by internal joinery and finishing work. The almost ‘plate-like’ lath-and-plaster walls that fold and float above the heavy stone walls were imagined to bring in a playful lightness to the organic building form—a dialectic between weight and weightlessness. The large dancing roof, on the other hand, loosely follows the profile of the mountain range and reminds us of the corrugated horizontal surfaces covering the old plantation bungalows, while also protecting the timber-framed windows and the lath-and-plaster envelope against driving winds and rain. The windows and openings embedded in the lath-and-plaster walls maintain a playful continuity to frame panoramas of the landscape, reminiscing the role that verandas played in the old plantation bungalows; just that, here, the veranda is an extended floor deck running inside of the building, thereby protecting its use against the cold external climate.
The building language pursued here relied on extended use of craft; both local practices such as stone and timber work, and the introduction of new traditions such as lath-and-plaster and steel welding. In doing so, the project sought to explore a form of ‘regional’ architecture that relates to the ‘place’ tectonically and topographically, while supporting the continuity and upskilling of the local knowledge practices.
PROJECT DATA Project Name Mountain House Location
Hantana, Kandy, Sri Lanka Status
Completed (minus landscaping) Completion Date 2019 Gross Floor Area 349 square metres Number of Rooms 3 bedrooms Building Height Two storeys Clients/Owners
Ana San Juan; Sanjeewa Ariyaratne Architecture Firm Robust Architecture Workshop Principal Architects
Milinda Pathiraja; Ganga Ratnayake Main Contractors
Amila Sanjeewa & team (steel work); Chaminda Perera & team (carpentry work); S. Lakshman & team (brick/ stone work)
Mechanical & Electrical Engineer D. K. Kumara & team (electrical work) Civil & Structural Engineer Ranmal Fernando Associates Images/Photos Kolitha Perera
1 Large overhanging steel roof of the Mountain House
1 52 FUTURARC
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