INLAND ARCADIA

On the outskirts of Vientiane, the capital of Lao PDR, in an empty stretch of land surrounded by farmland as far as the eye can see, this project plans a cluster of low-rise rental housing for students and young singles. The commission came from a Japanese company involved in the local water utility business and its local partner entrepreneur. Apart from the climate, the site offered no environmental and urban clues at all; it was a true tabula rasa. In the capital of a country likely to follow in the footsteps of Southeast Asia's more developed nations, the plan was to build carefully designed housing on untouched land, as a home for the young generation who will drive that growth. Drawn by the fresh ambition and enthusiasm behind it, we took on the project.

What puzzled us most was the client's strong wish for "a design like the villages of the Aegean islands, lined with pure-white low-rise houses." Aegean villages are, of course, beautiful. But transplanting that image, without any real grounds, onto Asian land so different in history and climate gave us, as architects, a kind of unease we had never felt before. At the same time, we recognized that in a country setting out to build a new society, such groundless images of the future are bound to arise and must be accepted as a matter of course. If architects remain closed off and unable to respond to them, we thought, they will have no reason to exist in the societies to come.

Knowing that the client's idealized image of an Aegean village would not waver, we decided to conceive the entire walled site as an otherworldly utopia, cut off from its surroundings. Aegean villages are not beautiful simply because of their white houses. Each house, a vessel for a family's life, gathers with the others in three dimensions, tracing the rise and fall of the island. Between them, lanes thread like capillaries, changing the view with every step. It is because these are inseparably bound together, forming a single landscape and way of life, that the villages are so beautiful. If so, what matters is less the design of individual buildings than how they gather, and how the spaces between them are shaped.

In the final plan, a deliberately winding main street runs down the middle of the site, which stretches nearly 180 meters in length. On either side, residential zones are raised on just under a meter of fill, which also guards against rising water in the rainy season. Across them we scattered low-rise housing blocks, free of the mechanical uniformity so common in collective housing. Streetlights, trees, and natural stones are dotted along the street, while canopies and doors painted a different color for each unit add variety within an overall sense of unity. The shared facilities include a pool meant mainly for relaxing, and a kiosk that doubles as the management office. The place we drew seemed like a mirage of utopia suddenly appearing on the blank slate of Vientiane's outskirts. That is where the name INLAND ARCADIA comes from.

Our involvement ended with the basic design, but to keep the plan from becoming a castle in the air, we studied everyday life in Laos along with local building materials and methods, and paid close attention to feasibility. The chance to create a place from nothing on a site of this scale is a rare one.

Above all, coming into contact with the unbridled imagination and passion of a country on the rise was an invaluable experience. To respond to it, we had to take an objective look at the grounds and origins of our own architectural thinking and change our perspective and stance. In doing so, we learned that this ultimately broadens our range of ideas and leads to something interesting. As long as we keep an open mind and can put in perspective the particular historical and regional contexts in which we have studied and lived, perhaps more interesting things are possible in countries still developing than in advanced nations, where the range of acceptable ideas and design conventions is narrow. That sense was born from this project.

The client was very pleased with the plan, and we hear that development is actually underway. We have yet to find an opportunity to visit, but not long ago, looking casually at aerial photos of the site on Google Maps, we could see two of the seven buildings are already built. Someday we hope to go there and walk those lanes ourselves.