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OH HO Residence in Bengaluru allows natural stone to express its intense materiality and authentic character. From the start, the project aimed to bring back a traditional but discarded building material and technology to create an essential living environment. The infinitely varied surfaces of the stone slabs now lend the house the same spirituality that pervades the stone temples of southern India.
The building is sited on a former quarry subsequently divided into a series of residential lots bordering Bengaluru’s national park. The owner of this 370 sq. m north-facing plot, architect Senthil Kumar Doss, founder of the firm Play Architecture, has built his own home there. As is often the case when owner and designer are the same person, the building became a personal manifesto.
Here, the manifesto is in praise of a local material and its construction technique. Once widely employed in Bengaluru and throughout the state of Karnataka, the gray stone called chapdi – traditionally used in 10-cm-thick slabs – was for some reason gradually abandoned. Although recognized historically as one of the most versatile building materials with the lowest carbon footprint, today stone has often been relegated to secondary elements such as sidewalks and boundary walls.
Wanting to explore the unexpressed – or rather forgotten – potential of natural stone, Doss designed his single-floor, 175-sq. m home and studio to be made entirely of stone.
The regular floor plan comprises nine square blocks, the central block a patio in typical Indian residential style. The 3.65-m module used was the maximum slab dimension that could be feasibly transported to the site.
The west-facing section contains the night zone: the master and guest bedrooms and a service block separating the two, with a bathroom for each room and an outdoor shower. The rest of the house is taken up by the living area, organized as a sequence of...
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