Dong Anh House

Dong Anh House

Status:

09/2017

Program:

Private House

Location:

Hanoi, Vietnam

Site are:

800m2

GFA:

374m2

Principal Architect:

Vo Trong Nghia

Design team:

Ngo Thuy Duong, Do Minh Thai, Tran Mai Phuong, Nguyen Duc Trung

Contractor:

Wind and Water house Joint Stock Company

Client:

Individual

Photographers:

Hiroyuki Oki

 The project is located on Van Tri Road, Dong Anh District, Hanoi. As it belongs to an isolated restaurant & villas complex with good security, open garden design is applied to create the connection indoor to outdoor with nature.
The basic idea aims to provide daily living spaces with a rammed earth wall system. Rammed earth is not new material in Vietnam but not widely used. Most of their appliance is known through the house system of ethnic minorities in the Northwestern region such as Ha Giang, Cao Bang, Lao Cai... Their houses are mainly built in a traditional way (named “trinh tuong”) in which the soil is rammed down cautiously. Those walls are made of clay, kaolin or mud taken the foot of limestone mountain, then rammed by wooden frame into thick earth walls which keep the indoor space warm in winter and cool on summer days.
The aim is to promote the above advantages and to limit disadvantages of bearing capacity of traditional rammed earth walls by modern technology and machinery. That makes architects use this material for Dong Anh House. The project has two-storey-construction area at 500m2 in an 800m2 land area. Owners is a family with a large number of members, thus there’s a requirement for many private spaces as well as sharing spaces to connect each others.
Living room and dining room in the center of the house is connected to nature through large view of both front & back gardens. Space organization is coherent and convenient for people to use. Amount of fruit trees on the roof, along with the open garden around the house is another emphasis that makes a green, cool and friendly environment to the people. And sloping roof is also a reasonable design for tropical monsoon climate in Vietnam. 
The rammed earth wall has a 350mm thickness, 2-story-height and eliminates the use of concrete pillar. Materials are taken different land mines, about 30km the construction site. With many types of earth soil, walls have different authentic textures which make the house an extraordinary appearance. After being collected, filtered, grinded, then mixed with cement, additives, the earth soil is added to formwork and compacted. 
Generally, the project gets the novelty in materials, the modernity, usability in function and the friendliness in architectural style & landscape.