"Imagine that you are in a box-shaped-room. Your skin is feeling cold from the air conditioner, you have a window but you can't open it because it's hot outside. You take a look at the window, there's no one outside, except for person moving commodity from the truck/pick up car. As far as you can see, it's only the same glasses building.
When it's around 4 pm, you can see the light starting to become the darkness. Still, in the same soundless situation. After all the hard work you did from the morning till afternoon, your body starts feeling tired breathing the recycled air from the machine. You tried to get out, but when you are outside, you feel the heat that still lingers on the neighborhood so you decided to go back inside.
Now multiply that by five days a week, 48 weeks a year. Maybe you will start going out with your car regularly to escape the neighborhood or finding yourself being alone most of the time."¬
Shophouse -row house - is a typology that commonly found in urban developing area. It is a flawed-man-made-environment that often leads to an inhuman living space situation where there's limited amount of green and high rate of pollution, both air and noise. This then leads to higher chance of having stress and isolation to the resident.
Our proposal responds the dense concrete fabric city by incorporating biophilic modules that brings in the elements of green to the environment by using the negative space that are neglected by the resident. The negative space area spaces of buildings that are not used as a living area but actually still can be filled by smaller building, like a solid façade and a rooftop.
The modules attached to the host building and adds the volume of green area to the landscape. It is formed as a house and also a biophilic-exclusive space. But, a module alone cannot do the job of biophilia, so the design utilize wide negative space such as rooftops or available parking space as a major biophilia elements. By introducing the biophilia modules, the existing resident could also have a space to heal their distressed mind by mending their relationship with the nature. So it creates a win-win relation between the old and the new resident.