Niran Apartment | RAD Studios

Located directly across the Silpakorn University, Niran Apartment is a vertical residential building that is hidden behind the typical Nakhon Pathom building blocks. Niran Apartment itself also has an exterior that is contextually aligned, so that when viewed and compared to the surrounding buildings, it doesn't look too flashy as it was designed to be unnoticeable.

The design of this building was highly influenced by the well-known arts university and Phra Phatom Chedi (Stupa). The influence of this context can be seen in the space program and project concept that emerges. Both places have been the city's main gathering space where most of the local people choose to spend their time in this place even for a long time. For this reason, Niran Apartment, which adapts to local contexts, is encouraged to accommodate an atrium design that can be used as a new public event space with a university-student-centered design.

With its main function as an apartment, maximizing units and areas that can be sold are the main criteria for the project. This is solved by designing three different types of rooms, each with a different depth of space. Also solving the problem of the atrium, which proportionally demanded high-ceiling. To achieve this, the shallowest unit has been placed on the third floor, which forms a larger open space for the atrium, then the higher floors have respectively applied with more depth of the rooms creating more sellable space while the need of the space- above -the-head on the ground has become unnecessary. This kind of arrangement has formed its space into an A-Shape, similar to the shape of Stupa. The unique shape of the building is creating another iconic landmark for the city.

The main challenge of this project is to create a program space with different privacy in each unit, but also with a meeting room that allows social interaction between users. These two things have been functionally designed to be connected both spatially and visually. Different from most vertical residences, Niran Apartment tends to connect dorm residents with events. The mesh partition that stands between the two spaces has been parametrically designed with a basic puller algorithm.