Bel-Air Townhouse
Can an urban home rebuild our connection to nature?
Manila, Philippines
Design Development
![featured-image](https://caza.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Belair_Banner.jpg)
The Bel-Air Townhouse confronts the steady loss of nature in Metro Manila, one of the most densely-populated and congested cities in the world.
![](https://caza.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/12-1.jpg)
Our design for the Bel-Air Townhouse revisits the story of a house and its garden. Instead of the traditional courtyard house with a garden in the center, or a classical villa with a garden viewed from afar, the Bel-Air Townhouse transforms the garden into a series of horizontal strata for inhabitation. Wrapped by floating gardens, the building redefines the domestic interior as a collection of spaces nested within landscapes that have themselves been turned inside-out. It thus becomes an architectural experience inseparable from the gardens as 3-dimensional volume.
![](https://caza.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/14-1.jpg)
In response to the diminishing green spaces in Manila, our vision of urban townhouses reconnects people with the lush forests that once defined the city’s equatorial environment. The townhouse offers a new idea for how to conceive of life in a city, with nature as both memory and future.
![](https://caza.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/8-cropped-1-836x1024.jpg)
![](https://caza.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/11-cropped-1-840x1024.jpg)
- PROJECT TEAM: Carlos Arnaiz, Jun Deng, Haorang Wang, Magdalena Fronska