On a leafy residential neighbourhood street, on the East Coast of Singapore, we recently completed a new build semi detached tropical house. We call it Camo House because the concept comes from a desire to blend in rather then stand out in the neighbourhood.

n land scarce Singapore, owners wish to maximise the buildable area when they redevelop their plots. Our project is no different, but we took the approach of dematerializing the building mass with an aluminium screen that mimics the existing trees on the street. The dot matrix based screen is composed of punched ‘holes’ and folded ‘leaves’ that are parametrically derived based on the foliage pattern of the surrounding trees mapped on to the aluminium metal surface. The resultant screen provides shade as well as privacy to the residents, while effectively making a low key ‘camouflage’ presence on the street. The volume of the house is topped with a lush garden on the flat roof that replaces the greenery it displaced on the ground. In time, together with the screen and street trees, we envisage the house being completely enveloped in green.