botanica vidoule phase 6

Motto: „The City is Entering the Botanika.“ The fundamental principle our design builds on is the effort to introduce the urban atmosphere into this area. That is why we opt for a denser urban fabric established by two half-open blocks stretching to the limit of the coefficient of usability of the area. That is why we violate the often-employed system of row housing in the vicinity by adding 2-3-sectional tenements. That is why we work with a distinct vertical articulation. That is why the mass composition grades in the square to establish a landmark visible from afar and mark the point of gravity here. The entire designed structure rests on a unifying base on both sides away from the central square; this base levels the site providing for placing the tenements on the same level. This base houses commercial areas and a car park, too. From the logic behind it, the larger part of the base is sunken into the ground because the whole north side is higher than the level of Pekařská. The block of residential stories rests on the base; it is mostly four-storied over the entire broken volume. Only on the square, to establish a local landmark, the number of residential stories is doubled to eight on both sides – east and west. The visual concept closely links to the volumetric design. It works with the principle of a homogeneously looking broken ribbon, longitudinally always behaving the same and different in colour and section. The arrangement of the residential mass reaches to the maximum usable width of the site. It is the base, on the contrary, that often steps back from the edge of the site on the street level making space for pedestrians and greenery. The square is conceived as a surfaced area allowing for resting and seating in the shade of trees; it should be a place where passers-by would want to stop and spend some time (for example in the front garden of a coffee shop). By its spatial arrangement, the square levels out the difference in elevation between the street and the park employing a system of outdoor stairs and ramps. Regarding the materialisation, we work with a transformed metaphor of a homogeneous mass of variable colours and shapes of the ´peel´ and the ´core´. That means the building covered by a unified type and colour of plaster is on each long side, while in sections – short sides – and where windows penetrate the envelope, the colours are different. Irregularly ´shot fired´ bodies of balconies then disturb the simple articulation of the de facto flat façade. The balconies consist of a unified size galvanised steel frame where always one vertical spandrel panels or a roof is filled with a perforated metal sheet introducing another effect into the balcony structure. The railing of other parts of the balcony cage is subtle and almost invisible cable netting. The effectiveness and economy of this selected balcony design then rest namely in the repetition of used elements and the small difference consisting in a variably modified position of the solid panels. This principle, therefore, allows implementing individual requirements on each single position of a balcony within the otherwise unified system. On the north, the sporadically insolated part of the building, where positioning of balconies does not seem reasonable, we work with at least their symbolic ´imprints´ in the façade’s plasticity establishing a particular logical link between both types of segmentation of the façade in colour and form.