PROJECT TEAM: Carlos Arnaiz, Jun Deng, Haorang Wang, Magdalena Fronska

Urban townhouses in the tropics should connect us back to the wondrous equatorial environments that once covered the city. The Bel-Air townhouse confronts our loss of Nature by revisiting the story of a house and its garden. Our version veers from the norm: instead of a 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. The house is wrapped by floating gardens redefining the domestic interior as a collection of spaces nested in-between landscapes that have themselves been turned inside out.

The house is thereby an architectural experience inseparable from the gardens as 3-dimensional mass, offering a new idea for how to conceive of life in a city with nature as both memory and future.