Extension of the residential house at Lokve – garden pavilion

Architecture is all-encompassing and can understand the world in its own dimension of social relations and personal experiences. Consequently, when faced with the simple questions of the expansion of an existing residential building, which involves above all highly pragmatic and utilitarian problems, we can, with the full-bloodedness of the capacity of the space, also question the elementary content and quality of living. The scope of the architectural brief is irrelevant here. Jože Plečnik, like many before and certainly after him, taught his students about this.

This small architectural intervention on a solid timber log dwelling house was the result of the client’s wish to move the dining room, which until now had been squeezed into a common space with the kitchen, to an open corner terrace with a south-west orientation. We approached the project as a study, looking for a form that on the one hand is contextual to the gable roof of the existing building, and on the other hand, with the steep roof design, allows the lighting of the spaces to be kept in check. The corner dining room is designed diagonally, with equal integration with the living room and kitchen. The double joinery, i.e. at the boundary between the two rear spaces and the dining room, and between the dining room and the exterior, allows the pavilion to be opened and closed in a number of ways – to the exterior, to the interior, or both together. The roof structure is also interesting, with the Y-shaped central pillar transferring the entire roof load to the corner of the basement retaining wall. The pillar is moved to the outside of the thermal envelope, as it would otherwise seriously reduce the usability of the dining area. The plane of the blinds creates an additional perimeter layer away from the glazing. The layering of planes, sliding and folding windows and rooms enriches the spatial experience and opens up the interior of the otherwise relatively closed house to the pastures, the lake and the view of the Krško field. The project was developed in close cooperation with the client, who also shouldered part of the implementation.

On December evenings, when the low sunlight descends over the hills west of Krško polje in the axis of the dining room diagonal and the outline of Snežnik is visible in the distance, it is in the long shadows of the ribbed shade, in the slant of the beech plywood ceiling, in the warmth emanating from the building and the simultaneous coldness that is only just distant, it is possible to reconstruct the “primitive feelings of home”, which are often lost to the common man, as Juhani Pallasmaa so honestly described in his article entitled Koti (Finnish for home) in 1994 in Ark magazine.

Authors of the project: BLENKUŠ Matej, CIMPERMAN Katja, CVETREŽNIK Anja, KLOBČAR David