Lien Residence was designed by Colin Seah – Ministry Of Design. From the front, everything is either in shades of white or of various levels of transparency. Volumetrically, the house is a simple slab sitting on top of a rectangular frame. It seems so low-key in that it appears to have no obvious façade. That is until one looks at the house from the second level of its adjacent buildings. One would then notice that it has a “green” roof, i.e. one covered in artificial turf. One may perhaps call this, following Louis Kahn, a “façade to the sky.” Because of the unusual zigzag geometry of the house, the visual continuity between the interior and exterior produces interesting layered transparencies from certain angles, whereby one sees the interior extending into the exterior courtyard which in turn is linked to another interior space beyond. As the transparent boundaries between the interior and the exterior consist primarily of sliding glass doors, the visual continuity becomes physical spatial continuity when the glass doors are slid open. This house is a-tectonic in the sense that one would not be able to find any expressive articulation of the junctions when the different building elements meet and thus one could not get any hint of how the building is constructed.
