Hanoi architecture workplace Studio 102 has transformed an incomplete house in the Vietnamese capital into an office for a landscape architecture firm, featuring plants that clamber in excess of its slatted timber cladding .
The offices for landscaping and horticulture professional Mein Garten occupy a previously unfinished and vacant semi-detached home in the Trung Hoà–Nhân Chính borough of Hanoi.
The building was obtained as an investment property but left empty until finally Mein Garten agreed to lease it. The business then asked Studio 102 to convert the windowless shell into a series of multipurpose spaces for its offices and showroom.
The existing inner program featured tons of enclosed spaces that conflicted with the open-prepare idea outlined by the consumer, so Studio 102 removed several brick partitions to cost-free up the interior and produce lines of sight to outdoors from all of the rooms.
Mein Garten also insisted that a connection with nature was important for the offices. The architects launched plants during the programme to create a far more comforting atmosphere and to support merge the inner and external spaces.
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“We want to produce a distinct workplace typology rather than a traditional closed, air-conditioned workplace,” architect Hoang Vuong Dao informed Dezeen. “The ambiance is quite essential, specially for businesses in the imaginative industries like our client. For us, plants or nature could do this kind of a process.”
Greenery seems in the garden, in a semi-enclosed room on the ground floor, around a decked patio on the 1st floor, on the roof terrace and on the building’s walls and facade.
“The uncommon point is that, as an alternative of getting an element extra to the creating, the plants are integrated and grow to be an crucial part of the entity,” said Vuong Dao. “The visual appeal of the developing changes as the plants alter.”
Plant-covered architecture is common in Southeast Asia, in which the climate is suited to sustaining tropical vegetation. Latest examples incorporate a house in Singapore with plants increasing across terraces and up through its central atrium, and a hotel on the Vietnamese coast with greenery covering its slatted facades.
The Mein Garten office’s street-dealing with elevation is largely shrouded by a framework containing horizontal slats of Durawood – a cement and wood composite in a position to withstand make contact with with plants and the region’s subtropical climate.
By merely painting the current brick exterior white and incorporating the timber frame, the price of renovating the creating was kept to a minimal and a series of environmental benefits resulted.
Plants that climb more than this wooden trellis bolster the all-natural shading it provides, even though breezes can nevertheless permeate the building and individuals inside are able to appear out by way of the gaps.
“While other homes on the street have the same seem, our building adjustments its search as seasons go by,” Vuong Dao added. “Alternatively of blending with the built setting, the workplace blends itself with nature.”
Vertical battens integrated into the fencing at street level meet perpendicular beams that extend towards the interior. This slatted ceiling covers a walkway produced from stepping stones placed in a pond, which leads from the street to a reception location in direction of the rear of the developing.
The shallow pond extends along the edge of a seating spot in a corner of the covered outside space that occupies a big portion of the ground floor, with the glass-walled reception positioned at 1 end.
A brick-lined staircase ascends to the office levels over, the place large windows look onto the outside spaces and planting incorporated into the scheme.
Employees are encouraged to stage away from their desks and use the outside regions as added perform spaces, which the architects and consumer feel will outcome in a much more relaxed and productive operating atmosphere.
“It is an workplace which brings individuals closer to nature, closer to each and every other, and can make them operate far more effectively,” claimed Vuong Dao.
Photography is by Vu Xuan Son.
Task credits:
Undertaking: Mein Garten Showroom – Outside & Landscape Advancement Joint stock Company
Architect: Vuong Dao Hoang – Studio 102
Landscape: Mein Garten, OLAD Jsc
Ground floor isometric model 
1st floor isometric model 
Total isometric model 
Ground floor prepare 
First floor strategy 
Second floor plan
