Description

The small white “village” built in the rolling hills of south Bohemia by the municipality of Strakonice for its elderly citizens clearly responds to a need for peace and seclusion while avoiding creating a sense of isolation among its residents. On the one hand there is a school, hotel and residential estate of detached houses in its immediate vicinity, on the other some of the home’s outdoor facilities and common rooms as well as the café and the chapel in the main wing are open to the public.

The guiding principle or design idea that informed the planning, which began in 1995, was to unite tradition and modernism both in its architecture as well as concept. The result is an example of “classical modernism” that reveres unadorned exteriors and inner functionalism while simultaneously upholding traditional notions of security, solidity and comfort. The architects therefore consciously avoided extensive glazing, metal elements and the like, building the complex as a brick construction and rendering the façades with a white plaster.

The complex consists of two parallel two-storey rows of apartments, divided into four segments which are pierced at right angles by a long building to the north that runs the length of the site. From the main entrance hall in this section, one can reach the administrative offices and all the common rooms as well as the two residential wings. The ground- floor apartments are arranged in pairs so that two doorways share a common entrance niche. This is reflected on the outside in the splayed frontages of the two apartments that face one another.

The upper storey is reserved for residents with more limited mobility who leave the building only rarely. Each of the single rooms on this floor adjoins a generous terrace so that the residents have immediate and easy access to the world outside. Residents who stay outdoors for any length of time are rewarded by changing patterns of light and shadow thrown across the white walls by the alternately open and solid balustrades, the projecting fire escape or the green of the lawns, which reflects gently off the walls as the day progresses.

The outdoor areas are criss-crossed with an unusually dense network of pathways between the individual sections of the building and segments of the residential wings. For the architects Libor Monhart and Vladimír Krajíc, this was particularly important in order to provide maximum access to the lawns, trees, benches and paths, in short to everything that makes life pleasant in the surroundings of one’s home.

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Originally published in: Eckhard Feddersen, Insa Lüdtke, Living for the Elderly: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2011.