Non-standard Architecture

By Savitha Hira

Photography: courtesy SHROFFLEoN

Sky Condos called ‘Para Todos’, which literally means “for all”, frees conventional apartment typology by employing a sustainable assemblage - a system of natural ventilation that depends on strategic placements of sky gardens, to evolve an architecture that is non-standard and a programme distribution that is unique.

Have you ever explored the number of permutations and combinations that a simple game of noughts and crosses can give you? While one may scoff at this ridiculous imagery, one should be informed that it is a colossal task and can actually come up with more than 4800 permutations!

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The Shroff n Leon partnership with architects’ Kayzad Shroff and Maria Leon’s latest project in Peru is an exercise that obsesses over optimization as the design for a distinct residence emerges on each floor of a total of 10 units spread across a sprawling 5000 sq. ft. each.

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Taking a cue from the game connect, externally, the project seems like any other high rise apartment block in the luxury bracket with terrace gardens and glass facades. However, the primary structural skeleton works out completely distinct units, with each unit having both, the living and master bedroom oriented towards the surrounding scenic golf greens.  The nature of the construct ensures that each apartment adopts a completely different programmatic arrangement, with each favouring an individualistic lifestyle. 

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The architectural footprint breaks through the conventional construct of the apartment building typology with no real variation within units and a completely inward-oriented living style to evolve into distinctly different plans and layouts, albeit of the same size, and fashioned around the placement of the primary assemblage in relation to the service core, but opening out into the scenic vistas with vantage views. In doing so, each apartment maximizes both inherent and juxtaposed potentials, working with individualistic performative sustainable agenda and catering to a completely different target client group.

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Quite simply, with each type blurring the boundaries between the interiors and the elements, the apartment block can be viewed, in effect, as a collection of individual houses with fantastic interior and exterior views, stacked one on top of the other. An architectural exercise, one could say, that is need-based rather than inspirational or aspirational; and in that, it seems to play to a full house!

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