The Bangalore-based practice imagines a public life for a private guest house, finding community benefit in a commercial briefA Threshold is the winner ofthe AR Emerging awards 2024. Read about the full shortlist hereThe first thing Avinash Ankalge and Harshith Nayak designed together as A Threshold was exactly that: athreshold. In a renovation of anapartment building, the pair proposed abreathable facade, extending outwards from the existing building. The facades gridof concrete planters encloses deep newbalconies, with light and air filtered bytropical plants; from the street, the vegetation contributes tropical green toBangalores urban landscape.The brisesoleil has become a signature element of A Thresholds work resolved variously in brick, terracotta tile, stone and ferrocement and Ankalge and Nayak see them as an opportunity to draw civic value from the typically inwardfacing typology of private housing. We try to give apublicness to every project, Ankalge explains.Nowhere is this more evident than in aproject dubbed Subterranean Ruins. Theproject began during 2020 Covid19 lockdowns when a Bangalore furniture businessman commissioned A Threshold todesign a weekend guest house at his orchards southeast of the city. We had adifferent idea altogether, Ankalge says. What happens for the other three to four days when hes in the city? we asked. Could it be more than a house a kindergarten for the village school, or a space for workshops and exhibitions?Few clients can be convinced of such anidea, but it is a credit to A Thresholds persuasive capacity that the final building partially realises this ambition. The resulting project is a series of spatially independent and so programmatically malleable spaces. Running perpendicular to a natural contour on the site, loadbearing brick walls define four independent rooms. The rooms are connected only by an arched enfilade of gardens on the lower side and a pathway carved into the slope on the other. One of the rooms a halllike space with many doorways out to a courtyard is usually a living room, while the other threerooms, which are more enclosed and feature en-suite bathrooms, typically act as bedrooms, though the architects imagine them becoming classrooms in a nursery, breakout rooms for an office retreat or exhibition spaces in a gallery. How the building is actually used is mostly beyond A Thresholds control, though they say weddings, exhibitions and yoga classes have been held here since it opened last year. The versatile plan as well as the robust material palette make it possible to imagine the building alternating between public and private use over decades, if not centuries. Itis a test case for Ankalges assertion thata house can be a city and a city can beahouse, referring to Aldo Van Eycks pictogram of a tree that rotates to become aleaf. If you give a solution at the scale of ahouse, you should also be able to design forthe city and for its everyday issues. Withpublic projects on the horizon including a school and proposals for the reworking of a highway interchange that borders a temple plaza, market andtransit hub thistheory will soon be putinto practice.