Emerald House

This is a new home, which involves a partial renovation of a classic Singaporean "shophouse," and the addition of new modern extension. The shophouse is a terrace typology, which is bounded on its two long sides by party walls. This house faces a very interesting urban situation, as it straddles two opposed conditions. Its frontage is on Emerald Hill, which is a rather quaint, low-rise colonial street. But its rear—where the new extension stands—faces the brutal incision of the CTE expressway as it travels north-south. The rear facade mitigates this problem with a strange fenestration strategy. Windows are "turned" to face an existing line of African Mahogany trees—that is, their angle changes as they face the densest portions of the canopy. This maintains their privacy, without an over-bearing use of shutters or other baffling devices. The result is an interesting innovation, in which windows are installed at angles approaching perpendicular to their associated facades, which are geometrically distorted to accommodate them.