H House

"Home" is a place where people first begin to perceive space during their stumbling and learning to walk period. A residence is not just a framework of space, it carries the memories and daily activities of the residents as they move through time, layering a thick emotional connection over ten or twenty years, creating a sense of belonging to the home. Hsueh Shun-Hung , a designer from U-Zi  Design, living next to an old house in Kaohsiung for many years, has opened up a new imagination for "home" - "Cao Cao". He believes that a residence is the most closely related to people's architecture, providing multiple lifestyle options, and that the planning of one's own home can shape the spatial image of one's home in reverse by being familiar with one's own sense of living.

The site of the "Cao Cao" residence is located in a low-lying area, and the building facade facing a six-meter alleyway is elevated by several steps and set back, opening up to the outside to convey that home is not a completely inward and closed space. The setback area creates planters and flower beds, providing a gathering place for neighbors to chat in the evening. The lattice wall elements on the facade also bring this openness inward, and the external planting and internal courtyard are closely intertwined. Through the glass windows, the outside world permeates into the interior. Upon entering the entrance, there is a tea-making area for the father, and the virtual and real walls that can penetrate make the laughter, warm sunshine, and tea brewing from outside accompany a peaceful afternoon. The building is overall designed in a pure white tone, attempting to express a lighter feeling by reducing the sense of massiveness. In the old row of houses, this entirely white residential building highlights its self-evidence, and against the neighboring old houses, white becomes a background that sets off the mottled red bricks and tiles.

The axis facing west brings the trajectory of light, which affects the position of the windows on the walls. The long and square-shaped windows of different sizes are all designed to shape the light form that the interior space needs. The large central courtyard of the building was initially intended to avoid the problem of insufficient light leading to dimness in the interior. "My father later jokingly said that he wanted to place a swimming pool under this courtyard to sunbathe," Hsueh Shun-Hung laughed and shared that their family's imagination of space had become more open. The room and workspace on the second floor also have a lively scene of light and shadow shining on the swaying tree shadows in the volume stack and white space.

Hsueh Shun-Hung views each functional small space as a single drawer, and the architectural design plays the role of a storage cabinet, integrating the arrangement of these drawers. In this arrangement of virtual and real space, the usage habits of the residents and the interaction with the surrounding area are considered from different perspectives, responding in various ways, and different people's homes will have various different appearances within the same residential space.