- Site-specific cases
We believe that the most environmentally sustainable attitude that an architect can present is to renovate the existing. The other aspect of our project is the importance of maintaining the so-called "solidarity infrastructure" that is much more often ruined and privatised in post-socialist countries today than kept alive and serving its important social goals and functions.
Especially when the case is an intervention in an urban environment, the renovation can have broader impacts in view and can strongly influence the surrounding tissue. We are proud that we managed to get into dialogue with such a case and to establish a long-term relationship with the client as we believe that this kind of work can bring better results for all of the parties, the client, architects, as well as users and their neighbours. All together, we have the potential of constant dialogue and learning from each other that will bring quality, sustainability and satisfaction with results on all sides.
The Student Dormitory was built at the end of 1970s, at the peak of Yugoslavian industrial and urban development as a quality rationalist building to host approx. 400 students in Celje, an industrial and vocational education hub at the time. Already in the process of building it was elevated by two stories, and reached its peak inhabitation of a maximum of 660 students in the late 1990s. Today the building is outdated in the sense of programme, living standard and connection to its urban context
After the dormitory’s financial breakdown, a local high school for tourism and gastronomy took over the operations and has decided to plan the general renovation, oriented mainly towards energetics and the urgent refurbishment of the rooms. Together with their team we proposed a holistic approach with a differentiation of programmes that would be able to economically cover the renovation and to fulfill the massive infrastructure that has been greatly underused in the past two decades.
Our proposal’s goal was to re-envision the programme scheme, opening it to diverse activities such as combining high school students in one block with university student rooms, adding different living typologies, including a hostel, a café that is to connect with the neighbourhood, redesigning outer spaces with a skate park and playgrounds and connecting all the programmes with the new addition that is to ensure accessibility and fire standards and to give the users some extra balcony space.
The investor decided to take the first step after some technical improvements in opening the building to new users and bringing it some fresh energy. They established a café that is at the same time a learning centre for their gastronomy students. The space that we design with a great care of the existing qualities of the original architecture is aiming to connect to the close vicinity of a mostly elderly neighbourhood and will try to host a coexistence of students and other urban population.
Apart from the new café, the renovation has already been partially implemented. In the past summer we have renovated the first student rooms, trying out three basic layouts and calculating the economics, as well as testing the technical details and materials for the remaining 177 rooms.
