Horizontal Green (Citi Bella 2)

Horizontal Green is a project of adjacent houses located in the center of Cat Lai, one of the re-populating urban areas of Ho Chi Minh City with young and active residents. In the context of old cities with high density of housing, people have accustomed themselves to the mixed and cramped urban, and lack of greenery.

Approaching this project, we aimed to create an interesting living space with improvised greeneries in order to blur the boring boundaries between adjacent houses. The design idea has been inspired by the horizontal orientation of immense nature in overall for the relaxation. To that horizontal orientation, each house was intermingled with other houses, and no longer be a 5 x 20m street house.

The design concept came from the green balconies. Instead of glass or solid balustrades, the green patches are connected to each other and smoothly slidies across the horizontal plane to create interesting spaces. The local plants, which are easily maintained and longliving, were chosen to minimize maintenance costs. In this project, acacia is the optimum choice for functionality and aesthetics. Therefore, trees play a role not only in creating microclimate for the buildings but also as the main design language to create simple beauty of nature.

In the context of architecture and living environment of urban housing in Ho Chi Minh City, we hope that Horizontal Green would become a better way to improve living conditions for the residents and provide more greenery to the urban.

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MIA Design Studio