The overall design of that house, including orientation of its internal areas, their proportions and mutual relations are, in the conditions of its rather small lot found within the existing buildings and shaded, in addition, by neighbouring buildings at its south boundary, was derived from architect’s efforts to open the house for light and sun as much as possible.
The starting point of sale and storage compound on the periphery of České Budějovice was the effort to “do it a bit differently”.
The untraditional building tries to address questions of how it’s possible to open a technology complex to the public, and how it’s possible to deal with the need to place three separate buildings on a fairly small site while maintaining functional traffic and operational relations.
Clamping the storage halls together, with one of them slightly turned, enabled a funnel shaped courtyard that serves as an open space with water, trees, benches, and an artwork.
Layout – The attic flat of 217 square metres underwent a total change of its layout. The main intervention consisted in an opening of the back part of the flat during which six chimneys had been deliberately revealed to become a dominant feature of this flat. The central area is a dining room, a living room with a “relax zone” and a kitchen with a cooking island. Moreover, the flat has a terrace, three bedrooms, two bathrooms and two separate toilets. Thanks to a raised study room, the view to the Old Town and the Prague Castle is not obstructed.
Concept / Colours / Materials – The colour design of the flat works with neutral tones of various intensity, starting from white on the walls via a spectrum of grey on the furniture and fabrics to black which optically works well with the suspended ceiling in the hallway. A counterpoint is brass metallic elements used, for example, in the kitchen and on the chimneys. An alternative element of the structure is oak wood. We developed its character in the dining zone, by means of a mosaic. In bathrooms we used ceramic tiles imitating stone. Door linings in the entire flat are profiled, as it is typical of interior doors in rather old Prague flats.
The family residence stands literally on a green field, near a clump of trees, in a pleasant countryside of central Bohemia. The house accommodates three generations of one family. A grandfather, a grandmother, a father, a mother and their two boys – there’s enough space for all of them to spend a summer and a lot of weekends together.
The house consists of several smaller, connected volumes, each of which serves a different purpose. The whole family meets in the central part of the house – there is a living room with a fireplace, a dining room and a kitchen. This area is the true heart of the house, with large sliding windows opening to a garden.
Layout – Thanks to the client’s changes, we have altered the original layout design to an open space without many corridors. All the facilities of the flat have been situated into the middle. A kitchen is adjacent to that unit, becoming thus the heart of the living room. We opened bathrooms next to each bedroom more.
Concept / Colours / Materials – We opted for minimalist colours and the whole concept is minimalist, too. The original plan to preserve the uncovered concrete bearing walls in the interior unfortunately failed due to the developer when they plastered them all by mistake. Therefore, we had to set about skim coating to achieve the desired effect. In terms of materials, we accented the central unit of the flat with a black skim coat Betonepox and in the same way we dealt with the surface of the kitchen cabinets which border directly on the central unit. To highlight it more, we put a built-in LED strip of indirect lightening into the ceiling.
Layout – This was a reconstruction of a typical, rather old Prague building. We were asked to create a sample flat. Thanks to the initial stage of the reconstruction, we had a possibility to change the layout completely and, therefore, to design a practical flat of 60 square metres. The flat is divided into several zones. The first zone is an entrance hall which is entered through the main door from the courtyard balcony. A tailor-made, built-in high cabinet is designed to be in the hall in the future and will contain a washing machine and a dryer, as well as storage space and a shoe rack. For practical reasons, we maintained the separation of the bathroom and the toilet. The next zone is entered through a glass door above which there is a glazed opening allowing natural daily light to diffuse onwards. Here we see a kitchen and a dining corner, incl. an extraordinary storage space. The third zone is a spacious living room with a reading corner. An added value of this interior consists in a dais where the forth zone is available, i.e. a bedroom, built-in wardrobes and a cosmetic corner.
The suite houses were built on the lot of a former store from the 80s. Four of the houses are located on the „meadow“ – a green roof above the shops in the parterre of the building. The space between the individual houses offers views of the far horizons of the mountain meadows. The atmosphere among these houses is intimate but neighbourly. The roof garden covers commercial spaces and garages.
The mountain town and ski resort Pec pod Sněžkou originated from the earlier original buildings in the valley, that expanded toward the surrounding hills. Slowly, large tourist accommodation and hotels emerged. The core character of the area is shaped by the individually standing buildings along the main street that are in close contact with the surrounding nature. The atmosphere is captured by a road rising through the valley along-side streams and by the openings between houses that allow a view of the further planes of the village and the cabins scattered on the meadows. The design of four apartment buildings continues the thread of these qualities and develops and further elaborates on them.
The historical First Municipal Brewery in Prague-Holešovice – a place where beer fermented and beer buckets were stored gave stimulus to an original design of an open, and, at the same time, introspective space for creative and modern housing in an industrial spirit. The converted building accommodates a total of forty loft-type flats; half of them are real industrial lofts in original storage cubicles, six were built during the conversion of the building’s front section and fourteen are in the new addition towards the square.
Article source: Petr Všetečka / TRANSAT architekti
The building by František Lýdie Gahura, opened one year after the death of Tomáš Baťa, is the most valuable monument of the Zlín constructivism and the highlight of the so-called “Baťa architecture” phenomenon. At the first glance the idea for the monument is simple: an empty prism placed on a visible spot above the town, on the central axis of the ascending park space, made up of several modules of the Zlín 6.15 x 6.15 m frame and clad only with cathedral glass. Inside, only the ill-fated Junkers F 13 aircraft in which Tomáš Baťa died in 1932.
Location: Náměstí T. G. Masaryka 2570, Zlín, Czech Republic
Photography: Jakub Skokan and Martin Tůma / BoysPlayNice
Collaborators: Karel Menšík, Alena Všetečková, Petr Daniel
Investor: The City of Zlín (monument renewal) in cooperation with the Zlín region (spaces inside the Gymnasium building) and the Tomáš Baťa Foundation (the Model of the Junkers aircraft)
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