In our increasingly unpredictable world, we need to train our brains to embrace uncertainty… but also prepare in a more domestic way. In this story, we invite you to take a trip to a 15m underground house. Discover a conceptual safe house. Sergey Makhno Architects designed it. Their effort was to create a cosy and safe underground home in the depths of the earth.
From the outside, Plan B resembles the entrance to a military base. It has automatic doors and a disinfection shield on arrival. The massive concrete structure is equipped with three entrances and a helipad on the roof.
A spiral staircase and elevator descend into the timber clad living room where a resplendent tree takes space, encased within glass walls. This central illumination lights up the book shelved walls and the piano space.
Plan B provides comfortable living for two or three families with children and staff with their families. Two flights of spiral staircases for staff are incorporated separately so that service and personal circulation routes do not interfere with each other.
Underground House Plan B has three exits, while the fire-resistant evacuation ring can be accessed from anywhere. It also envisioned to have a fish pool, while a separate room houses a garden with phyto-equipment, where one can grow vegetables and fruits. There is a separate room for medical care, with an isolator and a closed area for storing stocks of medicines, and another room for walking pets.
The underground house interior elements
A living room with a large sofa is like a cozy metropolitan apartment. Looking outside the window, there is a real picture of daylight as it should be on the surface. This innovation should keep the inhabitants’ biorhythms in tact.
A lot of attention was paid to the areas for sports, recreation and recovery. The physical and spiritual bodies are an integral unit, and when one feels bad, the other cannot feel good.
The pool area of the underground house is separated from the general sports zone by a screen and due to lighting it strongly differs in the mood. There is no daylight in the pool, the main source of light here is greenish lighting at the bottom of the pool, intending to feel like you are swimming in the night sea.
Zen-like meditation room features a powerful beam of light, with interchangeable schemes on the ceiling: it can be a starry, rainy or sunny skies.
Spacious master bedroom ‘Ivy’ is divided into sleeping, storage and shower areas and fitted with a LED system that gives an illusion of a stretched sky above the inhabitant’s heads. The empty space stands for calmness and stillness, decorated by quiet ivy strands that grow without the sunlight.
The terrestrial master bedroom ‘Mickey’ is a bare space, featuring a Kaws figurine and never-raining Khmara Clouds hanging overhead.
“We decided to make the kitchen professional — cooking can become a great new hobby. In any case, residents will be here quite often.
And in general, I think that stainless steel for kitchen surfaces is a great solution not only for restaurants but also for living spaces,” says a co-author of the project, designer Oleksandr Makhno.
The rest of the cavernous hideout has minimal, strikingly bare interior without almost no sharp angles, so that rooms shapes are almost cylindrical. This technique is not often used in terrestrial architecture, but here it immediately helps us to create the illusion of infinity, as if the walls just do not exist.
All systems in the Plan B underground building are autonomous. Water supply, sewerage, closed ventilation system with recuperation, intake, and air purification. Whatever happens on the Earth’s surface, life in Plan B will continue.
“This project is a reflection on the continuation of human life under any circumstances, and an attempt to find an answer to the question of whether architecture can create the impression of life at the surface while being in its depths,” concludes Sergey Makhno.