Inidi Twin Villas

RELATED: Private Houses, Public Good? An Architect’s Perspective

Placed on a site wedged between a residential neighbourhood of an informal building fabric and a public beach used by fishermen from the same community, this building design attempts to morph socio-physical pressures from both sides: i.e., the fragmented spatial sprawl and the culture of everyday constructions on the one side, and the informal ‘publicness’ and the poetics of the coastal setting on the other side.

Thrown into this set-up are the expectations of the building’s tourism-related cultural programmes and the challenges posed by the unforgiving climatic forces befalling the island’s western coast.

To that end, environmentally sustainable design strategies such as thermal mass, natural air flow, breathable courtyards, cross ventilation, natural light, compacted building form, dense siting, etc., have supported the contextually-determined spatial logics of the two buildings.

The construction programme was an extension of the layered concrete and brick masonry traditions of the contemporary vernacular, but organised within a reformed technical and environmental platform.

This reformation of the ‘everyday’ tradition is seen as a necessary step towards restructuring the local industrial capacities to improve the commonplace building outcomes in general and to strengthen the applicability of the contemporary concrete/brick vernacular in higher building markets.

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PROJECT DATA

Project Name
Inidi Twin Villas

Location
Wadduwa, Sri Lanka

Completion Date
August 2019

Site Area
880 square metres

Gross Floor Area
317 square metres

Number of Rooms
10

Building Height
8.075 metres

Client/Owner
Nalin Samarawickrama (Inidi Leisure)

Architecture Firm
Robust Architecture Workshop (RAW)

Principal Architects
Milinda Pathiraja; Ganga Ratnayake

Mechanical & Electrical Engineer
Enry Engineers

Civil & Structural Engineer
Ranmal Fernando Associates

Images/Photos
Kolitha Perera; Robust Architecture Workshop

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