Lightness, permeability, and sustainability are the key features of this unique house in Kuala Lumpur’s most established residential enclave. The home, which Tangu Architecture ingeniously designs and calls the “Permeability House”, brings in a warm sunlit atmosphere against a harmonious composition of natural and nature-inspired elements.
“This east-fronting house that had been renovated incongruently over the years,” the architect says. “It has now been transformed into a progressive testbed for design innovation, research and development, and trial of ideas and principles continuously developed by the practice.”
The home comprises three sub-units of extended family bedroom suites hinged around a common area on each floor, analogically akin to a village. Its entire form is encapsulated by the lightness of the steel frame lattice that wraps around the existing concrete frame. This ensures rigidity and robustness by spreading the loads in the 3D framework around the perimeter.
Tangu Architecture also innovated the building envelope design with a layering of materials and construction in a manner of “kiss the earth, dance with the sun and air”. Additionally, permeability control of the elements was also integrated into the building structure: air (breeze, convection, cushion, exchange plenum/atrium), light (direct, diffused, reflected, filtered), cooling (radiation, insulation, shading, evaporative), view (direct, obscured, screened, borrowed, object).
One of the standout features within the property is modernising the usage of traditional artisanal construction and vernacular materials – clay (drain) channels for planters and a lightweight green roof, cane (rattan) whicker for fence/door/screen application, cement screening, and plastering techniques for flooring and walls instead of modern tile finish. The home also reuses old timber for wall framing and roofing, as well as old rubble stones for landscaping.
“Overall, the design language comprises a charming sense of aesthetics and an attitude of working with the rawness of materials and construction, leaving behind traces of history, expressing the pureness of materiality, paring down to the essence, and accepting imperfections, weathering, patina, and mistakes from handmade construction techniques, much like the Japanese concept of “wabi-sabi”,” says the architect.
