Five marla is a hundred and twenty five square yards. Call it eleven hundred square feet of land, most of which you are going to build on, in a row of plots all doing the same thing, with neighbours hard against you on both sides. It is the size most of this city gets built on, and by some distance: Lahore is a five marla city far more than it is a kanal one. It is also the tightest brief anyone in this profession is handed, because there is no slack anywhere in it. We have several of these going up at the moment, and a larger one in Sialkot. These are notes from the sites.

What the plot actually asks for

The thing that defines a five marla plot is not the area. It is that two of your four sides are permanently blind. You share them with neighbours who have built, or will build, right up to the line, so no light and no air is coming from either, now or later. Everything has to arrive from the front, from the back, or from above. Once you have accepted that, the design more or less starts writing itself, and most of what follows is a consequence of it.

An open plot with brick footings laid in excavated trenches, spoil heaped alongside, and the blank flank wall of a neighbouring house behind. — DHA, Lahore, five marla. Footings going in, with the neighbour's blank flank standing directly behind them.

The wall in that photograph is the brief. It is going to be there for the life of the building, it is never going to have a window in it, and the house has to be arranged so that not one room depends on it. On a bigger plot you can place a window and light arrives. Here you cut for it, and you are careful about where, because an opening on a blind side is either not allowed, or looks straight into someone's bedroom, or gets built out the year your neighbour extends. What is left is light from above and light down narrow slots. That is a harder problem and a much more interesting one.

A tall plastered shaft in black and white, a hard diagonal of sunlight falling down one wall from an opening above. — Lahore, five marla. One high opening doing all the work in a space with no external wall available to it.

That is a single opening, high up, in a room that has no window it is allowed to have. It costs nothing beyond the decision to put it there, and it turns a space that would have been a permanently lit interior box into one that tells you the time of day. This is the part of the work that does not scale with budget. It is not a material and it is not an import. It is available on almost every plot in this city, and it is the first thing we look for.

Decisions are cheap early and expensive later

A concrete roof slab with the lines of the next floor set out in single courses of brick, a brick shell standing behind it. — Sialkot, ten marla. The plan set out at full size, one brick course high, before anything is built up.

That one is from a larger site, and it is the whole discipline in a single frame. A course of brick laid on a slab, describing every room of the floor above before a wall goes up. It costs almost nothing to lay and almost nothing to lift and move a foot to the left. Walk it, stand in it, and you learn what the drawing could not tell you. This is the cheapest moment there will ever be to change your mind, and it is worth taking slowly on any plot. On five marla it is worth taking slower still, because there is no leftover space to absorb a wall in the wrong place. Every foot given to a corridor comes straight out of a bedroom, and you feel it every day for thirty years.

A dark brick room lit only by two punched openings in the far wall, a bamboo pole lying across the earth floor. — Both DHA, Lahore, five marla. The same question at two stages: how much light is this room actually going to get.

A grey plastered room with a large square opening onto a brick boundary wall, a welded reinforcement cage standing on the floor. — Both DHA, Lahore, five marla. The same question at two stages: how much light is this room actually going to get.

A shell is the best model you will ever have of the finished house. There are no finishes to distract you, no furniture, nothing but structure and holes, so the daylight is easier to read at this stage than at any point afterwards. It is worth standing in every room at this moment, at different times of day, because an opening is still cheap to enlarge, lower, or move while the plaster is off. The second photograph is the same test a few weeks on: one large opening carrying a whole room, looking at the boundary wall, which is what a five marla room usually gets to look at.

The move that pays for itself most on a deep plan is the one that takes the most nerve, because it means giving up floor area. Covered area is the number the market prices, so removing any of it feels like going backwards. It is still the right trade. Cut a slot down the flank, or a shaft through the middle, and the rooms in the depth of the house get daylight and moving air instead of a light fitting and a compressor.

A wide view of an interior with full-height glazing to a garden on the left and a tall narrow slot window opening to a side court on the right. — DHA, Lahore, five marla. Glazing to the garden on one hand, and a tall slot pulling light down the flank on the other.

A slightly smaller house you can live in without the lights on at eleven in the morning is a better house than a larger one you cannot.

Materials, and the order you spend in

There is a quiet advantage to building at this size and this budget. Brick and concrete are the cheapest way to hold the building up, so they are what the building is made of, and they are doing the structural work they appear to be doing. Material honesty here is not a position anyone has to be argued into. It is what the economics already want, and much of the job is to avoid spending the remaining money undoing it.

An interior corner where a smooth white plastered wall meets a raw grey concrete surface, lit from a slot above. — Both DHA, Lahore, five marla. Left: concrete left as it came out of the shutter, running into plaster. Right: split-face stone laid in courses and grazed from a cove above, so the light does the work.

A double-height wall clad in split-face stone, grazed by light from a concealed cove above, with a worker at the right-hand edge. — Both DHA, Lahore, five marla. Left: concrete left as it came out of the shutter, running into plaster. Right: split-face stone laid in courses and grazed from a cove above, so the light does the work.

Where a finish is applied, it is worth letting it be a finish. The stone on the right is a facing, laid in courses and lit from the head so the light rakes across it and picks up every piece. It is not pretending to be a solid stone wall, and it does not need to. What makes it work is the light, which was decided when the cove was set into the ceiling, months before anybody ordered the stone.

That is really the whole argument about money. The last part of a budget tends to arrive at the end, when it can only buy the things that read as finished. The same money committed months earlier buys a better plan, a slot, a junction detailed properly, an opening in the right place, a cove in the ceiling that will make a wall look like that one. None of it photographs on its own, and all of it is what you actually live in. Getting the sequence right is most of what design does for a house at this scale.

What it comes to

None of these houses are going to be published anywhere. They are ordinary builds on ordinary streets for ordinary budgets, and that is exactly why they are worth the attention: a city is not made of the few houses that get photographed, it is made of these. Five marla is where the thinking has to hold up, and it is good work to be doing.

Written by Salman Mirza, SMA+Design

This is the thinking behind the work. If you are planning a house and want it reasoned through rather than styled for a season, the studio starts every project with the brief beneath the brief.

The photographs here come from an ongoing record of these sites, added to as the work moves.

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