Family House Prague 10

photo: Pavel Nasadil

The new building is located in a colony of workers' family houses in Prague's Bohdalec and replaces the original workers' house from the 1920s, which was in poor structural and technical condition. The house respects the scale of the surrounding development and replicates the footprint of the existing building, with the built-up area remaining at 11.9%. The house is a solid brick block with a sloping roof that follows the gradient of the garden. The consequence of the sloping roof is a reduction in the scale of the building as viewed from the northwest, that is, from the perspective below the Bohdalec hill.

The authors set several specific principles for the design:
1. Respect for the footprint of the original building as a defining limit, maintaining the direction of entry into the building, orientation, and relationship to the garden. The aim is to preserve the memory of the place and to connect with the original urban structure of old Bohdalec.
2. Similar to the original construction intent of entrepreneur Melzer to build affordable housing 90 years ago, the concept of the new house focuses primarily on spatial economy and economic feasibility of the investment made, with economical layout determined mainly by the suitable placement of vertical circulation within the footprint.
3. The concept of the house's levitation in the garden - preserving the typical Prague vertical distance from the garden. Suppression of the modernist barrier-free concept of connecting the interior with the exterior.
4. Reflection on the scale of Bohdalec houses - structuring the main mass of the building with scale-defining elements - windbreak, stairs, chimney - in the form of contemporary expressive means.