Barbora Tauerová (2nd year) - Journey studio Mjölk
The forest swimming pool as the destination of the journey, the grand finale, possesses that true mountain atmosphere, spiced with an industrial-urban ruggedness. Something like a dilapidated robot, absorbed by the landscape. In this spirit, I designed for the swimming pool. Parts that once could have had a different meaning and use than today. Things where the spectacle somewhat prevails over usefulness. I leave space for interpretation for the people. My approach to this task actually stems entirely from my first encounter with the place – the forest swimming pool. That was on witches' night when we set off there in the evening to the fire. The places around the swimming pool were literally overflowing with others who also decided to spend the last May evening there. In recalling this experience, I was sure that under no circumstances did I want to think of and attribute anything to the swimming pool that would simply be superfluous. No artificial attractions, forced functions, private investors. The forest swimming pool needs none of this. People like to go there even though the swimming pool is closed and in a miserable state. It just needs to be renewed so that people can spend their time there even more pleasantly than before. Given my intention to open the swimming pool to its surroundings, I decided to incorporate the path that leads from the zoo to the swimming pool into my task. My effort was to achieve the atmosphere of an urban park on the edge of the mountains. I decided to approach the adjustments to the path to the swimming pool through small, tailor-made interventions for the places I selected. The path lines the stream that flows through the swimming pool. Between the path and the stream leads a contour line, thanks to which magical meanders are created by the stream, if I dare say so. I selected a few of them and designed for them according to the atmosphere that breathed down on me at the given places. I want to achieve this particularly through the use of suitable materials.
Adam Cigler and Petr Vacek (5th year) - WWWWERK studio Fránek/Raková
"Werk" is an Old English and Dutch term for work. The story of WWWWERK is best expressed through the following sequence of events: You find out - you come - you learn - you design - you buy materials - you produce - you eat - you drink - you meet - you establish a studio - you exhibit - you sell - you stay - you teach others. All of these activities, however, are umbrellaed by one important one - YOU WORK. Before WWWWERK, there was an abandoned factory B. H. Hellmann. Old workshops, mysterious cellars, warehouses, an alley, a rundown apartment building, a hostel, a nail studio, a grocery store, junk, a huge gap, walls on the brink of collapse, a "sieve" roof or omnipresent rot. All of this is now located in Prague's Holešovice at Tusarova 31. We propose a conversion and meaningful use of the entire complex. A shared public workshop, a material store, co-working offices, apartments, rentable studios or workshops, an experimental architecture workshop, and a showroom with a café will be created here. Thus, WWWWERK is born with a unique and purest concept: to transform a workshop into a workshop.
Eliška Kováříková (3rd year) - Student Housing Under the Trench studio Suchánek/Janoš
I have always shot up in the back seat of the car to be the first to see it. Just around the next bend. In clusters of clouds. The Klatovy lighthouse. The Black Tower. And I search for it like this even today, from the front seat of the car. I search for it every time I approach the city. Its foot, wrapped twice around the ruined ring of city walls with high bastions. Beneath it, I sense a network of secret corridors and catacombs. I recall stories about interlinked cellars through which my uncle got from one house to another. And also those about the miraculous image of the Virgin Mary, which once shed bloody tears. It is the awareness of the intertwined medieval network. A network of conceptual certainty stretched between the rings of the walls. Just as the walls crumble between fingers, the city north of them disintegrates and loses its internal order. New builds of apartment blocks and a four-lane road weaken or even completely devalue the character of the thoughtfully planned network. I chose a place right there, on the edge between the old city and the outside. It is a buffer point upon entering the city from the most frequented direction - from Plzeň. Arriving cars see the familiar postcard silhouette of the city - two towers of the church with the Black Tower. Below them, the buildings sink into the overgrowth, which in no way resembles the gates of the city. Student dormitories replace this greenery and express their kinship with the center. The house thematizes the walls because they hold the rest. The mysterious atmosphere that I keep from childhood memory, I try to materialize. The elongated building lines the old fragmentary wall and the house takes on the function of a second ring. The façade to the street is flat, austere, and clear. It comes alive thanks to a metal rolling façade. It is thus constantly in motion, transforming and adapting. At night, it closes, just as the gates of the city used to close, becoming a protective rampart. On a sunny day, it opens up completely. To the south, towards the old city wall, the clear mass varies in the intimacy of courtyards. Metal complements wood. Identical dormitory cells with their own entrances and backyards are arranged in a row next to each other. Each conceals five small rooms at different height levels, a kitchen, and a living study on the ground floor. The roof gutter is a unique connector for the inhabitants of the house. It is accessible from the third floor of each cell and from a staircase growing from the medieval bastion. It stretches uninterrupted along the entire length of the building and intersects with the existing pink house.
Eliška Málková (3rd year) - City Around - Housing in Červený Kostelec studio Suchánek/Janoš
Small town. A place where almost no one wants to live. How to attract more residents? How to highlight small-town qualities?
During a walk in Červený Kostelec, I was struck by the number of signboards - shops, workshops, and studios that function here. For 8,500 residents, there are about 2,500 businesses - anything from rubber seals to mobile applications is produced and sold here. Apartment buildings and work all in one. Unusual typologies. Therefore, I decided to fill the given plot with housing combined with business. A mass of apartments mixed with shops, workshops, and studios. Young people can live and work in one place. Five minutes from the woods, thirty seconds from the square. Small apartments with gardens - peaceful and virtually accessible.
In searching for a form, I focused on small-town typology. Blocks of houses surround an empty center that previously served for farming. They do not maintain the same character but rather influence each other more, as do the facades of opposite buildings - apartment buildings, villas, family houses.
I also close the empty plot. I surround it with three- to four-story apartment buildings that reflect their surroundings - the seriousness of the square from the north, the looseness of the sumptuous villas from the west, and I introduce a new layer to its center. A ring of row houses - the most efficient form of individual housing. Each house has its entrance, each has its little garden. Everything is minimal. Minimal space with minimal concerns.
New interventions also create new spaces. The inner ring is cut off from the outer world and is raised by one floor to allow residents to enter directly from the living room. It consists of a maze of private gardens and terraces suitable for drying laundry or barbecuing. The yard is surrounded by row houses and has a more public character. It can be accessed by car, one can play football there, or organize markets. Yet it is still mostly just for the residents of the adjacent houses. It is accessible from two sides – one gate, one street.
The house is viable in itself, yet it reflects its surroundings. It is closed off from the city around it but simultaneously arises from the city around it. It is a new entrance to the old city.
Marie Štefanová (3rd year) - Another World studio Suchánek/Janoš
Remnants of a street line on two sides and in it houses from past centuries. I shape it so that the house stands sideways to the square and creates the first of several walls. Here we are in a small town - a few shops and above them live people. I can slip between the houses through a mouse hole, just as elsewhere in Kostelec. Here is already another world. An open space and in it a cluster of houses. They call it a cluster. I propose it made of thirteen family houses, which I arrange around common places. Its form has something of a community living. People live here together, but they also have their privacy. The common place is a semi-public gravel road. Its boundary is traced by the facades of the houses themselves, walls, shelters, or just the transition between the gravel surface and the grass. The houses lift household life a floor above the road, and their orientation changes depending on the transformations of the spaces of the cluster. Anyone can walk through here. I know where my path leads, where it is in front of the house, and when I am already behind it, in a foreign garden.
Šimon Marek (3rd year) - Housing for Seniors, Prague - Slivenec studio Hendrych/Janďourek
The residential complex for self-sufficient seniors in the "village square" of the city district of Prague with a significant village character is an adapted form of sheltered housing1, primarily oriented towards community life, rather than regular assisted care. For greater individualization, the rooms here represent private apartments while common rooms are represented by a system of central buildings. The morphology of the entity is based on a dialogue of the original parts of the municipality, repetitive details characteristic of the square and surroundings, such as brick walls separating public from private, passages between houses, outdoor staircases, alleys, and building materials. The schematic composition of the buildings consists of three basic circles: the outer one, partially following the boundaries of the plot, composed of residential units2 with a capacity of 84 people; the middle one, consisting of private courtyards/front gardens adjacent to individual apartments; and the inner core with common functions, the main socialization tool of the object. The rooftop garden functions as a substituting element for the residential units located in the 2nd floor, which do not have their own front garden. The complex also includes a public self-service shop with access from the main street, serving not only the residents but also the inhabitants of Slivenec in general, similarly to the “semi-public” space at the main entrance to the complex, which ideologically serves as a platform for connecting seniors and the village through shared leisure activities. Therefore, the most transparent elements of the core are located in the eastern, more publicly open area of the plot (kitchen, social room, lecture hall), while the elements that encroach most on the private life of the residents (laundry, drying room, bicycle storage) are hidden deeper in the internal block in the western part. The fragmented structure of the core, along with the narrow passages between the walls delineating the whole in relation to the street line, creates many intimate nooks, especially in the private parts of the object, blurring the boundary between private and public life. Another point is the immediate connection of the object to the nearby primary and kindergarten school, allowing students to use the greenhouse, workshop, and swimming pool, as well as the orchard3 that spreads across the northern part of the plot.
1. Sheltered housing is a way of life for a group of seniors in a single, usually purpose-built apartment, where residents individually inhabit their private rooms and together use common spaces like the kitchen, bathroom, etc.
2. The usable area of a basic apartment is 40m2, designed to provide residents with a minimal yet fully-fledged comfort.
3. Plum/apple orchard - quarter trunks/semi-trunks at a distance of 6-7m
Tereza Čermáková (5th year) - Elemental Spa studio Mjölk
In this project, I was interested in the transformation of a small Jizera Mountain village into a SPA VILLAGE. Bílý Potok is defined by its position relative to the mountains and several watercourses. These give the village its overall character; according to one of them, it was named. In the past, the character of the village was influenced by a businessman who built a textile factory here. The functioning of the village and its surroundings were significantly transformed by this. I was interested in the symbiosis created between Potok and the power influence of the businessman in such a small village. Although the new master impacted the character of the village quite significantly, this “incursion” brought the residents many positives; from job security to improving the overall state of infrastructure in the village and its surrounding area. I contemplated what means could achieve a similar synergy in the case of a transformation into a spa center. Creating a psychological and physical CENTER OF THE VILLAGE. Bílý Potok is today a transit village, which is mirrored in its orientation around the road. In Bílý Potok, there is practically no public space or pub acting as a natural center of communal activity. Bílý Potok is often hit by floods. This has led to the creation of several-meter empty (flood) strips along both banks of the river. With minimal modifications, a SPA COLONNADE could emerge along the river, ideal for the promenade of spa guests through the village. REHABILITATION and INTEGRATION of unused objects within the village into spa activities. The establishment of a spa would lead to a significant strengthening of tourism in Bílý Potok, generating new needs, onto which numerous essential services (shops, guesthouses, restaurants…) would attach. SPA >> the reason to go to Bílý Potok. Thanks to the spa industry, the village which one passes through becomes a destination village. In the mountains, one enters a different mode of perception. The senses are seemingly exposed, detached from the everyday context. Spas can evoke a similar effect in a person, so their form should be as abstract as possible - just space, light, and water - ELEMENTAL SPAS. SPAS AND FACTORY The specific industrial aesthetic is inscribed into the spas. The construction is left in its starkness, allowing today’s incomprehensible, UNNECESSARY BEAUTY of the factory to shine through. The entire factory in Bílý Potok was powered by water energy. Water flowed to the turbines through architecturally subordinate buildings from the flume built on the Smědá River. These small technical objects surround the southwest façade of the main building, which is the compositional dominant of the area. The true HEART OF THE FACTORY, however, was hidden in the interiors of these “attachments.” The heart was actually exiled from the main actions. Similarly, I feel these spaces as a pivotal point for the spas, it is the WATER PATH OF SENSORY PERCEPTION. I walk through and perceive.
Tobiáš Hrabec (3rd year) - School on a Table Mountain studio Suchánek/Janoš
In the north of Ralsko are endless forests, decommissioned military warehouses, and a uranium mine. Huge sandstone cliffs rise here, where local people once created their homes. The sparsely populated landscape back then is now nearly abandoned. Memories of the presence of various armies linger in the air, and human intervention is ever-present here.
Ralsko is the antithesis of untouched, virgin nature. Perhaps that is why people do not head there. Perhaps that is why Ralsko is abandoned. Abandoned, except for that small school located on a large rock, where something under a hundred students and a few professors live.
They are trying to understand the landscape. Its significance for contemporary society. It is a high school with a dormitory, where future biologists, landscape architects, architects, farmers, foresters, and economists prepare together. They learn how our environment functions, what it means, how to exploit it, and how to cultivate it.
The school building is carved into Široký Stone, a table mountain with a vast plateau that it accesses and inhabits. It is a tower above vast forests and lakes; it is human intervention.
One enters the rock via large stairs. They lead into an arched entrance hall with smaller spaces for laboratories and workshops. Here are places primarily for studying natural history and working with wood. A bit higher is a classroom with a long table, where the main dialogue occurs.
The school is interwoven with student rooms in several variants, so that some live next to the classroom, others above or below, alone, in twos, threes, or fours. The boundary between school and leisure time is much less clear here; the bell does not ring, and part of the study is in the students’ hands as self-study. As such, students weave through the school, across the plateau or outside through the landscape as their research requires.
The entire school then meets for breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the largest space of the school - the dining room, which is at the level of the plateau and has an open view of the landscape. Here they are together.
BcA. Veronika Stryalová (1st year of master's study) - Memorial to Dr. Milada Horáková studio MgA. Leona Matějková
The topic emerged as a competitive assignment for an architectural and artistic contest announced by the Stránský Foundation. The competition was announced on June 27, 2014 (the day of the sixty-fourth anniversary of her execution by the Communists). The results of the competition were announced on November 17, 2014. The site selected for the memorial was Pětikostelní Square. Other locations were considered, but due to the circumstances and delays surrounding the site selection, I decided not to respect the assigned location. Not to mention that the park at the end of Sněmovní Street seemed to me to be torn from the context and life story of Milada Horáková. I started searching for a more suitable place, and my analysis of the entire issue led me to the space of Pankrác Prison, where Milada Horáková was imprisoned, interrogated, tortured, and subsequently executed by the Communists. It is also the last documented place where her remains were kept before they "disappeared." To this day, they have not been found, thus she was never truly buried, only symbolically. Later, however, I began to be dissatisfied with Pankrác as well, because despite the strong atmosphere and interconnectedness of the place, the demands and ambitions of the whole project were not fulfilled. I began to feel the need to disseminate questions related to the search for national identity beyond the site of the prison and indeed beyond Prague. Therefore, I started looking at the issue from a different perspective and in a broader scale. The broader dimension I sought was found in the character of Czech banknotes - as an attribute of the state, which is one of the most understandable and distinct visual manifestations of national identity. Alongside monuments, memorial plaques, or street names, the personalities on banknotes express political values and historical traditions, thus contributing to the self-identification of society as a whole. On a symbolic level, banknotes reflect the political realities of their time. I sought to achieve this in my project as well. At the same time, I react to the fact and declaration of the Czech National Bank that a new nominal value will be introduced within a few years, thus the 10,000 banknote. Therefore, I decided that in the context of my proposal for a memorial to Milada Horáková, I would propose its placement on the 10,000 Kč note. I also complement it with a timeline that is characteristic of Czech banknotes, and the events around the 1950s lend themselves to the timeline's structure. In the realization of the proposal, I followed the current structure of the arrangement of all the essentials and the framework form shaped by the late artist Oldřich Kulhánek, who is the author of all current banknotes. I respect the established grid and supplement the series, but I also add my expression, which is the mirroring and placement of the portrait on the left side of the banknote. This has not only a symbolic but also a conceptual subtext, just as the symbols selected for the front and reverse sides of the banknote.
Vu Dinh Quang (2nd year) - Forest Tower studio Mjölk
At the site of the former forest swimming pool, I felt the need to build something that would return it the glory it gradually lost over several decades. The space defined by the treetops provides a feeling of intimacy, and it was necessary to work with this quality. The focal point of the intervention is the lower part of the object, which lies significantly below the level of the forest swimming pool, thus isolating the two parts from each other. I further utilized the terrain in the design of the residential units which I submerged into the ground. The characteristic feature of these units is a lapidary morphology, framing the skylight or courtyard. One enters them through long narrow corridors from the central square at the lower level of the object. The lower floor also includes a modest restaurant with facilities for both the operator and visitors, and on the upper floor, we find, in addition to public toilets and showers, also a sauna with an outdoor swimming pool. The dominant feature of the entire object is a tower - the guardian.