Bahria House

Ten marla in Bahria Town, Lahore, photographed before it was finished. The house is a stack of white rendered volumes, each one set back or pushed forward from the one below it, under flat roofs. The first floor cantilevers over the car porch, carried on a deep concrete beam, so the ground under the front of the house is left open. Above it, a double-height opening in a black steel grid holds the whole elevation together.

The boundary is not a solid wall. A concrete jali, a perforated screen, runs along the front of the plot, and the gates beside it are vertical steel bars set to a related spacing. The street can see through to the forecourt, and the forecourt can see out. On ten marla in Bahria Town, where the standard move is a high blank wall and a solid gate, that is a decision about how much the house is willing to give the street.

The forecourt is being laid in large-format stone, set out in a grid with open joints, one slab at a time. Down the side of the house a narrow passage runs the depth of the plot: white walls on both sides, open to the sky, the same stone underfoot. It is the leftover space between the house and the boundary, and it has been given the same paving and the same attention as the front. Leftover space is where most houses stop trying.

These are site photographs, not finished ones. Ladders against the render, sacks stacked at the boundary, the paving half set, the wiring still coiled on the wall. The studio documents its projects while they are being built, because the detail that gets drawn and the detail that gets built are only the same thing if someone is watching.