Court House by moad

The brief had two streams of thought that shaped the imagination about the house. One is how it should be built and two is what it should have. The former should be a house that sits lightly on earth and the latter is the experiential charm of an ancestral house (South Indian) with a court. They intended to adopt a court for an urban context that carries the spirit of traditional houses yet responds to contemporary values and issues.

Court House is a spatial void with a memory embedded on its exterior through material and interior through the spirit of space.

They used reclaimed bricks salvaged from old houses that were being demolished in Chennai and its surroundings, to give way for apartments. Court House is built with bricks aged between 15 to 70 years and were salvaged from more than 40 demolition sites and tested for compressive strength. The exterior of the Courthouse stands as an expression of a collage of these bricks of different ages. Today their second life continues.

On the inside is a spatial void, organized around a narrow open to sky court, reminiscent of traditional courtyard houses of south India. At the entry foyer is a stair to the first floor housed in an unusually steeped-pitched roof. The pairing of the court and the steep roof runs the entire length of the house and it is their relationship that holds the rooms together. Places to sit and lie down flow into the edges of the walls in the living and entry foyer. Spartan in its finish, walls are made of oxide plaster and doors are reclaimed. Windows are made of industrial ‘z’ mild steel sections and floors are semi-polished ‘mandana’ slabs. At every stage of the project, a sense of lived-in was the single point agenda. Memory and materials were woven to create this.