Vertical Glass House
Atelier FCJZ
Vertical Glass House was designed by Yung Ho Chang
as an entry to the annual Shinkenchiku Residential
Design Competition organized by the Japan Architect
magazine in 1991. Chang received an Honorable
Mention award for the project. Twenty-two years later
in 2013, the West Bund Biennale of Architecture and
Contemporary Art in Shanghai decided to build it as
one of its permanent pavilions.
Vertical Glass House is an urban housing prototype
and discusses the notion of transparency in verticality
while serving as a critic of Modernist transparency in
horizontality or a glass house that always opens to
landscape and provides no privacy. While turning the
classic glass house 90 degrees, Vertical Glass House
is on one hand spiritual: With enclosed walls and
transparent floors as well as roof, the house opens to
the sky and the earth, positions the inhabitant right
in the middle, and creates a place for meditation.
On the other hand, Vertical Glass House is material:
Vertical transparency visually connects all the utilities,
ductworks, furniture pieces on different levels, as
well as the staircase, into a system of domesticity and
provides another reading of the modern theory of
“Architecture as living machine.”
Architects Atelier FCJZ
Location Longteng Avenue, Xuhui, Shangha i, China
Principal Architect Yung Ho Chang
Project Architect Lu Bai
Project Team Li Xiang Ting, Cai Feng
Client West Bund
Area 170.0 sqm
Photographs Courtesy of Atelier FCJZ