A69

UMMAGUMMA HOUSE . Stará Role

A69-architekti . photos: © Tomáš Rasl

What does define the quality of an environment?
How should one behave at a place without any quality?...Where the genius loci is a matter of a lottery with catalogue houses?…Where there is no interesting morphology, any history, vegetation connection, or long-distance views?

How one’s own territory may be defined without being arrogant? How can one create an own world and get away from the neighbour paranoia? Without an inspirational context we have to start to create our own impulses, pictures, to define the environment.
The traditional scheme of a solitary house in a garden doesn’t work any more. It divides a plot into the house and the rest. The rest is then called a garden and is the only filter between the space inside the house and the outside world.
The garden is a mutually monitoring space...This way thuja walls, pergolas and sheds are established saving one’s personal territory.
Our interpretation works with a hundred-percent use of the plot. There is not erected a new house in the garden, but a never-ending film of motives with a house in the garden.
The house takes the whole area ignoring transitions between the interior and exterior and vice versa. The garden stratifies along with the house. Reading layers and plans is important when composing a classical canvas. A detail of a foreground, centre and background.
We work with the same scheme...although only in the area limited by the plot size.
The typological diagram was the main material for designing a form. Its meaning was to capture each room in the house and establish their requirements on the intimacy, sun, neighbourhood contact, and capacity.
This diagram started to shape as a spiral. The spaces with bigger requirements on intimacy are located closer to the middle of the plot, and higher. The spiral begins at the entrance and technical facilities, and culminates by the master bedroom.
The spiral is imprinted into the load-bearing wall by its motion determining the main spaces of the house, its terraces, atriums and gardens.
Stratifying the plans, views from the house to the house and from the garden to the garden, and multiple vistas are the main motives of the house.
The gardens, terraces and patios have different character corresponding with their purpose as well as the supposed time of the use. The space diversity is balanced out with the material and colour discipline.
The surfaces have a soft texture and almost monochromatic colouring.
The walls are made of hollow ceramic blocks, the floor structures are reinforced concrete.
The swimming pool is a reinforced concrete tank. The roofs are flat, walkable, with extensive sod, or just surfaced with gravel. Aluminium windows and curtain walls are triple insulation glazing. The floor is finished with a polyurethane screed, or oak lamella flooring. A gas-fuelled boiler provides heating to whole house. Solar panels located on the roof provide additional heating to the swimming pool.

Family House; M. Rovenské 13, Karlovy Vary - Stará Role; CZ /
author: A69-architekti, s.r.o.; ing. arch. Boris Redčenkov, ing. arch. Prokop Tomášek, ing. arch. Jaroslav Wertig / cooperation: ing. Jitka Macáková, ing. arch. Vítězslav Danda, ing. Pavel Jahelka / chief building engineer: Omega project, s.r.o.; ing. Jan Škopek, ing. Miroslav Fejfar, ing. Stanislav Kolář / investor: private / contractor: Bau-stav, a.s. / completion: 03-2014 / photographer: Tomáš Rasl