Typical terrace houses in Malaysia are poorly responded to natural lighting and ventilation due to the constraints of party walls with limited opening on both ends: a huge car porch normally dominates the front while the wet kitchen and yard encloses the rear so every spaces within had to be air-conditioned. Hence, our brief focuses on reconfiguring the front and rear of the house to improve the daylighting and cross ventilation with human-centric activities as the strategy.

The front is designed to be a series of interconnected spaces blurring the indoor-outdoor boundaries. For the rear, an open plan kitchen and dining with landscaped yard are proposed as an inclusive day-to-day space encouraging human-nature interaction. Responding to the context, the glass roof is designed matching the neighbours’ roof gradient to ensure the friendliness of scale and proportion to the streetscape.