refurbishment and addition of apartment houses

Owing to an enlightened local council, Dolní Břežany became almost a synonym of good contemporary architecture and the care for public space. The community owns a dilapidated yet architecturally sound house in a historicist style. Aside of its renovation, an alteration of the courtyard buildings is being prepared where new flats should be built. Regarding the courtyard buildings, we had been inspired by additions ad hoc randomly tightly arranged we know from especially for example outbuildings of farmsteads in the Czech countryside.

The designed fractured structure works with a typology of a family house primarily opened inward – that is inside the quiet corners of small inserted yards. In our opinion, the quality of housing is not harmed – on the contrary, it can become very comfortable and intimate. The houses get enough private space outside, do not cancel out and, moreover, enjoy the view of the central part of the garden. We can find their predecessors in historic Mediterranean dwellings (e.g. Apulian trulla) and in our country (Zlatá ulička/Goledn Lane) but namely in analogies with continuously added heterogeneous outbuildings that existed in similar situations perhaps most often. The common denominator is a micro-scale and irregular shapes of outer ‘residual’ spaces here.