Lazy House

Idea
The idea of the house lies beyond its physical form and is constructed from the inside out based on the principles of spatial connection with the environment from which the house grows and to which it looks. The logic of the concept is based on the ties between the house and the city, the house and its garden, and the garden and the city. The relational schema continues within the house, where the flow of the interior's social part permeates throughout the house, extending sensorially into all exterior and scenic connections, while the internal partitioning separates the privacy of each private component with its own extroverted relationships. Thus, the visuality of the house is created by its inner essence and the permeability of the physical envelope that does not divide the interior of the house from the external environment. The appearance of the house acts as a filter for this materialization, where the interface maintaining privacy is addressed with facades’ membranes with maximum permeability from the inside out and several principles modulating the permeability from the outside in. This defined figure then employs material mimetism for insertion into the context of the garden and city and defines the visuality of the house.

Situation
The house is situated seemingly outside the context of Baťa's urbanism and its structural and visual canon. However, the perception of Zlín is omnipresent in its solution, defining the horizon of events in the entire architectural concept through mutual visual and transparent contact. The plot is part of a new urban unit that has arisen by adapting the former gardening colony, which was divided into six relatively generous building plots and connected to the surrounding urban structure by its own communication. The location adjoins the Zlín district of Lazy at its terminal part in the highest position on the slope below the forest and above the Zlín valley. A specific feature of the plot is its inverse orientation to the cardinal directions, with the view into the valley directed north, while the southern part of the plot is influenced by the slope and forest rising above the house. However, this is "redeemed" by an excellent view of the year-round sunlit valley. The view encompasses a wide segment of Zlín with characteristic clusters of houses in greenery (Lazy, Forest district, Podvesná, Zálešná) in a panoramic range from the Baťa factory complex to Příluky, and a deep view into the valley in the background with Lukov and the Hostýn Hills. The typologically reference buildings from which the project draws its emotional anchoring are striking architecturally solitary villas situated in environments with exceptional views, such as “villas on cliffs” or “residences above the city.” These serve as the essential archetype of a house that leverages architectural means from the exceptional nature of its location. In the topographical conditions of Zlín, the view from the house is analogous to the views from Mediterranean villas or Los Angeles residences.

Architectural solution
The house is designed as a compact solitary volume with a square floor plan, featuring a rotated disposition within the shell, where the exterior respects the contour line logic of the surrounding houses, while the interior is drawn towards the city in the direction of the plot boundaries. The composition of the house is created by a base embedded in the slope and a prism of the main living floor placed upon it. The resulting form of the house thus appears as a single storey from the southern side. The base floor is embedded in the terrain and demarcated by a garage entrance wall angled perpendicularly to the longitudinal axis of the interior. The prism object of the upper floor thus creates a dynamic cantilevered element protecting the garage entrance. The motive of the angled disposition is repeated on the upper floor. The grass-covered green roof returns to the plot the missing area of the garden taken by the footprint of the house and is complemented by a fully glazed rooftop studio. The main living space of the house is concentrated on the upper floor and can be viewed across from the garden to the city through the central social zone. The rotation of the disposition allows the placement of living rooms around the perimeter so that they maintain their own intimacy and scenic logic. The concept of the house allows for changing the usage dramaturgy with a fluid response to the changing demands during the life stages of the building. The composition structures the house into individual parts so that they maintain their own intimacy related to the garden and view, and it allows for a multi-generational arrangement through two separable guest sections on the entrance floor with the possibility of independent access. The expressive solution employs mimetic camouflage of aircraft. The main living floor visually connects with the sky by dematerializing through the reflections and moiré of the facades and “levitates” on a corten base embedded in the slope. The green roof with the glazed studio merges in a view from above with a carpet of a garden city dotted with houses. The strategy of embedding into the slope and blending with the character of the garden is applied in the solutions of the cellar, pool with grotto, as well as the driveway and fencing with an entrance gate and trash box. The garden seamlessly wraps around the house, creating hidden residential bays protected from external views while allowing panoramic views of the city. The open concept also naturally achieves intimate habitation through vegetation solutions that protect the lateral boundaries of the plot.

Disposition solution
Access to the house is from the street through a gate and an entrance floor with a garage, which allows for a separate entrance to the main living floor and guest apartment. The main living floor is located on the upper level and is accessible via a straight entrance staircase that opens a view into the garden. The disposition arrangement minimizes the use of communication corridors in favor of a fluid living space. Zoning into quiet and social parts extends from the center of the disposition to the edge. The principle of the arrangement is maximum accessibility of all quiet areas from the central social zone while simultaneously separating the parts designated for children and parents. The social zone consists of the combined space of the kitchen, dining area, and living room, which runs across the entire disposition while being protected by its placement within the layout. Around this central part, the other living rooms are arranged in corner positions around the perimeter of the disposition so that they benefit either from the view of the city or from the connection with the garden. The house is visually permeable (from the inside out) through its northern and southern facades, while the eastern and western facades protect the house's privacy in relation to neighbors and allow views out and sunlight in through ribbon windows covered with stainless steel membranes and blinds. The parental zone consists of a bedroom connected by "secret" doors through a wardrobe to its own bathroom, while the children's zone includes two children's rooms that flank a bathroom and toilet between them. The disposition of the upper floor is complemented by a glazed study connected to the living zone and terrace through a glazed winter garden and a pantry linked to the kitchen's built-in wardrobes. The lower floor is concentrated around a garage for two cars located at the center of the floor plan, with both entrances to the house situated on either side of the garage. The western part of the floor contains a guest apartment with a separate entrance designed for grandparents, guests, or teenage children. The apartment features a free layout centered around a social part consisting of a connected kitchen, dining area, and living room with a separate intimate bedroom section complete with its own wardrobe, bathroom, and separate toilet. The apartment is linked to the western and northern parts of the garden via a terrace, separating its privacy from the main living garden of the upper floor. The main entrance to the house connects to a wardrobe that can be converted into another guest room linked through a bathroom with a sauna and laundry area to the rear technical part of the floor plan connected to the garage.

Construction and material solution
The house uses its load-bearing structure as a skeleton, insulation as muscles, heating as the circulatory system, ventilation as lungs and trachea, water and sewage systems as the digestive apparatus, electrical installations as the nervous system, and surface layers as the skin that protects the entire body and allows its surface to breathe. The construction of the house consists of a reinforced concrete monolith, contact insulated with high-performance thermal insulation in a layer suitable for low-energy to passive buildings, and visually clad on the exterior and interior with materials that naturally support the compositional structure of the house. The mass of the main living floor has fully structurally glazed northern and southern facades with large-scale coated triple glazing, while the facades facing the neighbors visually consist of a stainless-steel fabric covering the windows. Its silk-glossy surface complements the reflection of the glass and creates transient moirés that blend in view upon arrival with the sky. The lower floor, including the garage doors, is clad in pre-corroded corten steel sheets with a distinctly rusty color, which sensorially connects the house with the garden and materially with the entrance gate and garden elements. The color and material solution of the house also works with a semantic demarcation between the outside and inside. The metal exterior contrasts with the wooden interior composed of large-format veneered cladding, built-in furniture, and solid floors. The dominant material for the walls, doors, and built-in furniture is veneered elm cladding combined with a solid iroko floor. The overall impression is a continuous free flow of space throughout the interior of the house. This flow is punctuated in the individual epicenters of the disposition by elements clad in glass that rhythmically modulate the surface of the walls with reflections of light drawing views from the large-format windows into the deeper parts of the interior. Attention to detail is subordinated to the scale of the house as a whole and its perceived "lack of detail," suppressing the revealed tectonics of individual elements in favor of an obvious sense of the flow of the interior skin throughout the house. The logic of veneering follows the wholeness and planar essence of the wall surfaces, and the sheets of veneer are placed so that readable repetition does not occur, linking between elements and surfaces of breaks. The direction of the floor and terrace boards follows the shell of the house and subtly hints at the tension between the two rectangular systems—exterior and interior. The atmosphere of the interior works with the dramaturgy of its variability created by the tension between natural and modulated brightness and its intense variability over time. Artificial lighting is designed as an integral (and yet still autonomous) layer of the interior based on a combination of direct and indirect light connected in synergy with the significant materiality of the entire interior. The lights work with a combination of reflected "iridescent" light scattered through lenses with two-color diffusion filters across the ceiling surface, and direct illumination with colorless light into the interior space. The ceiling solutions use a subtle retroreflective effect of pearl spray in shades transitioning gradient-wise from the center to the edge of the disposition into the individual bays of the interior. The design of the house allows for several layers of gradual separation of the "scene" of the interior from external influences using membranes of curtains, drapes, and screens, with materials deriving from the linked characters of walls with varying light permeability ranging from fine translucence to complete blackout.

Garden and external components of the house
The first layer integrating the house into its context is the garden, designed as a fluid carpet developing the original drainage of the plot with several residential epicenters. The natural dominant of the highest part of the plot is the composition of a grotto with a pool, creating a residential space of a covered exterior with a view into the valley of the city. The elevation of the pool is set so that its water level is above the "level" of the house's roof, which can thus be overlooked while swimming, perceiving it as connected to the garden city in the valley. The curvilinear form of the grotto consists of progressively rotated massive larch boards coupled as exposed formwork for the hidden reinforced concrete shell embedded in the terrain modeling that extends above the grotto, thus creating a "cave" carved from the hillside of the garden. The stainless-steel pool uses an edge overflow system with a channel mirroring the slope of the adjacent terrain, creating an infinite water surface effect. A cover protecting the water temperature when the pool is not in use is hidden underneath a bench made of stainless rods submerged in the pool. The cellar is an adaptation of the original brick vaulted cellar, a relic of the original gardening colony. It was supplemented and equipped with an internal waxed steel installation forming shelves for bottles. The roof of the cellar is made of Irish moss growing from reinforcing slate flakes that correspond with the fluid modeling of its shape. The garden is defined by a freely flowing connection of grass and meadow that separates the house from the street, and the area before the guest apartment from its main residential part. Intimacy towards neighbors is maintained by high plantings of bamboo and grasses organically linking to the undulating terrain, which is compositionally complemented by several solitary trees chosen for their vibrant expression throughout the seasonal cycle. A separate thematic layer connecting the composition of the house with the garden is the house's roof with a glazed studio slightly embedded into its surface. This allows the perception of the green roof as its own "infinite" meadow from the view within, blending it into the garden city.

Technological solution
The house is designed with an emphasis on connecting its architectural-spatial qualities with currently available technological principles, achieving parameters approaching passive standards. This, along with the reference to the geographical name of the locality, has become the source of its naming, Lazyhouse. The entire house has controlled ventilation with heat recovery combined with underfloor heating connected to a heat pump with two boreholes located beneath the foundation slab of the house and a summer reverse cycle used for cooling. The heating and cooling are low-temperature and imperceptible to the touch on the surface of the floors, with a combined distribution featuring its own regulation heating the walls in the bathrooms before towel rails and the steel columns in the winter garden. The external intake of the ventilation system is led through a ground register into the space adjacent to the cellar, allowing for temperature adjustment of the air before the actual heat recovery due to the routing in frost-free depth. The ventilation ducts are led from the machinery room under the garage ceiling and in the floor structures to the outlet of exhausts in plenumboxes with distribution through imperceptible slots in the line of the flooring towards large-format glazing. Return circulation occurs through intake in the ceilings of the bathrooms and slots between the ceiling and cladding. The roof studio can be shaded due to its maximum glazing using screen blinds and locally cooled with a unit hidden in the step to the terrace. The pool technology with filtration is located inside the house and utilizes gravitational water collection from the pool channels and subsequent recirculation. The garden is irrigated by distributing gravitational subsurface water, and from a drilled well and a reservoir hidden in the space above the grotto. An active lightning rod is placed outside the house at the upper corner of the garden behind the grotto, covering the entire area of its plot.