Project: The Ring House
Architects: studio prAcademics
Location: India
Area: 7.965 sf
Year: 2021
Photographs by: Courtesy of studio prAcademics
Ring House by studio prAcademics
Meet the Ring House, a serene retreat in Ahmedabad’s northern suburb, gracefully embraced by water canals and lush fields.
Designed as a weekend getaway for a sizeable family, it seamlessly blends into its natural surroundings, preserving the existing greenery and abundant birdlife. Drawing inspiration from traditional village architecture, this circular gem embodies the ‘faliyu’ and ‘osri’ typology, with open gathering spaces, ample light, and verdant surroundings.
The Ring House is a harmonious fusion of tradition and modernity, where architecture dances with nature, offering a serene escape from the hustle and bustle of daily life.
The Ring House is located in Jaspur, the northern suburb of Ahmedabad. While a water canal passes through the site’s southern edge, agricultural fields surround the rest of the sides. With water and green fields all around and more than 120 trees, predominantly Mango and Chickoo (Sapodilla) trees, the site is an abode for a variety of birds, an important element of the biodiversity of the context. The proposed project is a weekend home for a large-sized family comprising 14 members, including four kids under ten years old. As the site is amid natural features, we intended to insert the built form carefully without tempering the existing set of features and trees.
We identified a zone with no fruit trees and tried to knead the compactly built form, hence creating a smaller footprint. The site has varied contour levels, and the program evolved with landscape design integration with existing contours. The zone where the house was to come has been elevated by 3 meters and conceived as a table with grown lawn areas. This elevated even table partially hosts the built form, while the rest of the built areas are cantilevered. Proposing the house on an elevated level provided numerous opportunities for the forecourt and house to be surrounded by the thick foliage of the grown fruit trees, with birds roaming around frequently at arm’s length.
The built form gets its inspiration from traditional village typology from the Saurashtra region of Gujarat, where ‘faliyu’ – the forecourt is an open-to-sky entrance space, providing adequate light and ventilation, ‘osri’ – the linear verandah becomes the buffer space often used for informal seating space, circulation space, and occasional sleeping area. Kitchen and sleeping areas are arranged beyond the liner verandah to keep the privacy intact as well as create thermal comfort with controlled sunlight and ample ventilation.
To create a compact form of this typology, the built mass took the circular ring form. Here, the circular entrance space ‘faliya’ becomes a place to gather with ample seating spaces, allowing skylight to penetrate through slits created by lifting up the circular roof. ‘Osri’ here serves its traditional purpose of circulation corridor, dividing the bedrooms, kitchen, and dining area from the volume of living space. As the brick-cladding walls and layers of internal spaces circle around the living areas, hence forming the ring, the built mass gets strategic perforations, creating a variety of view frames of the naturally kept landscape from the internal spaces. Slant, saucer-like slab projection is designed to provide shading to the walls and openings.
We at studio prAcademics engage ourselves to investigate the interaction between the human body’s dynamics and the subtleness of spaces. General perception suggests that space remains frozen, and everything, including humans, revolves around it. Very rarely, it is the physical manifestation of human dynamics, and space gets reversed while space starts revolving around everything else.
