Study for Individual Coordinated Street Construction

If you look around today at newly completed and under-construction residential development projects in the Czech Republic, in most cases you will see buildings made from brick systems or monolithic structures supplemented with brick infill. If you look beyond the Czech borders to Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, and other similar countries, you will see buildings that are significantly more diverse in terms of the technologies used. In addition to experimenting with modular systems, the frequent use of lightweight cladding on reinforced concrete load-bearing structures is also common, as we are accustomed to seeing in administrative and commercial buildings.

Exterior appearance, individually assembled from a stylish collection, used in mixed developments of various types: a) row houses, their end sections, and duplexes b) detached houses positioned with their blind facade on the property borders

The popularity of brick systems in residential construction stems from the fact that people perceive the use of bricks in house construction as fundamental to the quality of living. This is due to extensive experience with living in panel apartment buildings. However, the main negatives that drive people away from these panel blocks are generally not related to the material-technical solutions themselves, but rather due to layout limitations, moral obsolescence, and dysfunctional or inadequate infrastructure in the vicinity of the building. Simply fulfilling individual needs by acquiring a new home may not always guarantee a high-quality living environment. This similarly applies to investors who choose a family house in satellite areas, where they buy purely individual buildings, but often without regard to the neighborhood solution, adequate amenities, and insufficient connection to the surroundings. It is no surprise that these areas have also acquired the unflattering label “horizontal panel block”.
Coordinated individual housing development

Quality housing that respects human individuality while also conceptualizing the quality of the environment in the broader context of a street or neighborhood is in demand in the Czech Republic today, even though it currently occurs only in modest amounts. Increased interest is partly due to the foreign experiences of investors and developers, as well as the work of urban planners and architects in raising public awareness.



“For the creation of a distinctive and vibrant environment through its coordinated development, one of the important prerequisites is also the possibility of individualizing individual houses while maintaining a cohesive architectural concept for the whole,” explains Petr John, managing director of Goldbeck Prefabeton.

For them, variability of the construction is a necessary requirement – it also allows for easy modifications in the future, including potential expansions. Among construction systems, those that separate the load-bearing structure from the remaining parts of the building best meet these requirements. Such a solution not only enables easy changes in the arrangement of the interior spaces of the house and its external appearance, but the load-bearing structure generally also has a significantly longer lifespan than the interior spatial solutions, the exterior façade, or technical equipment. This allows for easy reconstruction or change of use of the building as a whole in the future.

The same applies to the flexibility of solutions for gradual land development, where an investor, for example, a young couple, starts with a smaller house and can expand it as their family grows, perhaps into a two-generational house. For example, by converting a parking space into a garage with an extension, etc.

Goldbeck Skeletsystem

An example of the aforementioned approaches is a study designed for the construction system Skeletsystem Goldbeck by the office SUM. architects. From the perspective of the developer of such a project, the system has additional advantages. Besides a strong background and complete realization of load-bearing structures, it is primarily the speed with which the load-bearing structures of houses in the Skeletsystem can be constructed. The company is therefore able to build the load-bearing structures for an entire street in a short time, and potential homeowners can see not only the mass solution of the houses, but can also get an idea of the future appearance of the entire neighborhood. They can then choose completely individual interior spatial solutions for their houses and also various concepts for their external appearance. While the developer can reduce cash-flow project costs by postponing the construction of individualized solutions until the actual owner is determined, stabilized public spaces and the possibility of individual selection, on the other hand, increase the value of the project.