On the balcony with a lantern

Cars now race along the Pobřežní Avenue on the former embankment of the Karlín Port, precisely at the location where ships once docked in the side channel of the Vltava River. However, in the courtyard of one of the original riverside houses, the atmosphere of the era still lingers—steep stone stairs, high Viennese ceilings, window recesses, and a gallery from which there is no escape. We projected this historical atmosphere into the complete reconstruction of one of the gallery apartments. From the original two-room apartment without a bathroom and toilet, we created a fully functional living space with two bedrooms, a bathroom, and still a larger living area than the original. We utilized the higher ceiling to extend the structural principle of the gallery into the apartment, adding a separate workspace on the gallery. In fact, we expanded the usable floor space of the apartment by nearly a quarter through construction modifications.
At the same time, we were loosely inspired by the architectural discourse of the time, which clearly took place apart from the pragmatic problems of architect and builder Václav Žaloudek. While his house copied the tried-and-true Austro-Hungarian classic style, i.e., the cheapest housing for working-class families with shared sanitary facilities, Czech architectural elites were simultaneously struggling to find a national style and generating critical responses to the role of decorative elements in architecture. We loosely drew inspiration from contemporary architectural experiments with arches and simplified forms of decoration for the conception of the modern interior. Progress from 1927 translated into 2017, with a slight exaggeration necessary for the absorption of contemporary technologies, ranging from a gas boiler to a TV altar, to hidden elements of an online-controlled indoor environment of the apartment. Paintings and reproductions complete the bridge between the history of the apartment and the contemporary world.