Hillsides Radlická, Prague

Prague

2024

The quality of living is created primarily by the residential environment or location where we live, and then by the comfort of the apartment itself. At the same time, the residential environment is determined by the quality and character of public spaces. The basic prerequisite for quality of housing on the Hillsides Radlická is that an urbanistically coherent and therefore locality-constituting environment is created here. That’s because we can only identify with a place we understand. Urban typology is the carrier of clarity. It establishes the character of the environment, and therefore cannot end at the corner of the next house, but must be spread throughout the whole place or part of the city, because only then can a locality be created, and with it a neighbourhood made up of its residents.  This means a home and with it a community. And only a functional community is socially safe and, in today’s terms, resilient. And only safety and resilience can bring permanence, and this in turn can bring a concern for maintaining such sustainability and also consideration, i.e. care for the environment in which we live. The structure of the area is determined by the urban and spatial texture, the outline of which is identical to the adjacent projects, with which it creates a clear and solid link, and therefore a single entity. The western outline is defined by the adjoining development of Skansky and Crestyl, the eastern outline by the building SHQ. The building is a special place of urban texture, because it is the center of gravity. At the same time, through its size, scale and form, it dialogues with its older sister on the opposite side of Radlická Street. The building is bound to the spatial texture of the surrounding residential complex by its atriums and extended wings, which like locks fit into the geometry of the opposite full and empty fields of his compositional network. The wefts are divided into a regular network, some of which are filled with building volumes and others are empty, creating yards. Stone and wood are the equivalent material of this structure. The resulting urban texture represents a continuous substance laid on top of the morphology of the terrain and geometrically defines it or gives it shape. In fact, it forms the entire terrain of the residential complex, as the original slope has been turned into its negative, a clay pit, by brick mining. The empty fields of the grid, i.e. the yards between the buildings, move like staircases along the gradients and contours of the terrain, shaping its garden terraces. Into this network of terraces, the volumes of buildings are placed – also stepped – in a geometrically precise and at the same time organic way, i.e. in the order of the landscape. The individual houses and their whole, i.e. the residential complex, form distinctive figures, or rather a figure, at the same time distinctive and contextual to their surroundings, as well as to the morphology of the place. The design is thus tightly bound into it, literally intertwined. Its structure, and thus its figure, is at once rational and intuitive, simultaneously open and fixed, and providing privacy. Yet it forms a simple unity with one spirit. Thus, it builds a strong place and creates a space of good neighborhood and home. The proposed form of development uses the dramatic morphology of the area whilst it brings personality to individual houses and apartments. It gives them views, privacy and uniqueness of their positions within the articulated volumes of the residential buildings and their complex. Each apartment has its own outdoor living space – balcony, terrace or front garden – and each house has its own defined outdoor living room in the form of a dedicated, but shared, public garden courtyard for its residents. And a community garden on the common roof, not facing the windows of the flats. The design clearly articulates a range of spaces from public (streets, paths and courtyard passages, playgrounds, public parks) to semi-public, neighbourhood (small entry piazza, shared residential garden yards, rooftop community gardens) to private (front gardens, balconies and terraces). The apartments look out onto the vegetated courtyards, a public park, the opposite slopes of the Radlická Valley and onto the urban and landscape horizons.