Terraces
Residential · Staff & student housing
2022 · sP+a
Terraces is the staff and student housing for the Urban Excellence Centre in Telangana, India, designed as part of a larger competition entry for the centre. The site slopes, and the idea came straight from it, with the housing stepping down the terrain as terraced rows. Students live in dormitories on the ground floor, and staff in a mix of two- and three-bedroom flats on the two levels above, each flat opening onto a terrace of its own.
The rows follow the contour of the slope, curving with it, and step down towards the road below, each level set back from the one beneath so that its roof becomes a terrace. Between the two rows, the ground is shaped into a stepped landscape. The tall block at the far end is the guest hotel, outside the scope of this housing.
The form starts from a single block. Blocks are stacked along an arc, with every other one pushed to the front, which gives the two-bedroom flat. A three-bedroom flat takes four volumes, and a dormitory one. The pink volumes show how the service spaces are organised, tucked behind the back of the big volumes.
The units interlock in plan, shifting against one another along the row, and step back level by level up the slope. The living rooms and bedrooms face the terraced side, each with its own opening, a small landscaped balcony, and a pocket in front that also lets light and air down to the service spaces of the unit below.
Taken apart floor by floor, the row has the student dormitories on the ground floor and the staff flats on the two levels above.
Along the lane, the ground-floor rooms open straight onto the planting, and the flats above step back with planted terraces, three levels in all.
Drawings and views
- Along the lane, the openings of the ground-floor rooms with planting in front
- Site axonometric of the terraced rows following the contour of the slope
- The stepped row, planting carried onto every terrace
- Form development, with blocks stacked along an arc, alternate ones pushed forward, and service spaces in pink
- Interlocking footprint above, the stepped row it produces below
- Floor by floor, the dormitory level and the two levels of staff flats