Apartment Yang Chi and Wang Yi Wong, architects from Singapore: a penthouse in a skyscraper at Manchester Square, part of the hundred best interiors in London.

Passing the gallery

Text: Dmitry Kopylov

Materials: - (c) Henry Wilson

Magazine: (70)

This penthouse in a skyscraper at Manchester Square is included in the hundred best interiors in London. New York and London are increasingly resembling each other: not only is the living room - with access to the roof, like Richard Gere in "Autumn in New York", it has three of four walls absolutely transparent - from floor to ceiling For millennia, the poetics of architectural masterpieces persistently and selflessly imbued with the religious and national mentality of a particular people, firmly retaining its original features. But over the past hundred years the world has changed dramatically. The borders have collapsed, humanity has become aware of its commonness. Paradoxically, in the first place these changes are most clearly embodied in architecture. Yang Chi and Wang Yi Wong, architects from Singapore, relatively recently settled in foggy Albion, confidently took their place among the elite Architectural Association of London. Having started their career with styling Asian interiors, they rather soon abandoned this promising materially, but dead-end direction in fantasy art, leaving their fellow Europeans to comprehend an amazing, mysterious, but still quite regulated (as for artistic solutions and images) culture of the East. Their projects were liked by the public with an “open-minded” vision of space. One of the latest creations of Chi and Wong plunged into shock the most zealous admirers of abstractionism and surrealism in architecture. The penthouse in a skyscraper at Manchester Square in London is a huge rectangle, the three walls of which are completely transparent. The originality of the architectural solution was not only the use of plastic as the starting material. (Suffice it to recall the casino "Luxor" in Las Vegas and the pyramid in front of the Louvre Museum in Paris.) The building's shape (cube) was unusual and the fact that the British condemned doggy "My home is my fortress" was destroyed: the architects presented a draft residential project premises ... At all times, people, creating their homes, sought to protect themselves as much as possible from the misfortunes of nature and the raids of unfriendly neighbors, localizing ideas about the Universe in the walls closed from the world. Then it was impossible otherwise: open - therefore, defenseless. The exception was the architecture of the ancient Aztec and Mayan civilizations who built their houses without roofs. In a world where the sun was three hundred days a year, people worshiped the luminary as the supreme deity and did not want to hide their life from its all-pervading beneficial rays. Yang Chi and Wang Yi Wong reject accusations of exhibitionism with humor, describing their project as an attempt to organically merge into the indispensable distance of the cosmos, not tearing away from earthly roots. And in the literal sense. Despite the hi-tech sublimating in every detail of the interior, the floors, contrary to the established canons of this style, are made of original varieties of wood - Tuscan fir and American oak. This applies to exclusive wooden furniture bedroom and dining room. Only a huge living room is exhibited at the "universal view", the rest of the rooms are safely "covered" on the lower floor of the penthouse - it seems that the architects have reached the limit in their fantasies ... Everything is much deeper. Born in one of the most beautiful capitals of the world, Singapore, Chi and Wong were finally able to overcome the viscous attraction of unshakable truths and let their dreams go free.