Mirje 2 apartment building

The starting points we took into account for the design of the second apartment building in Mirje are entirely the same as the first one (Mirje Apartment Building), but we were faced with the slightly more delicate situation of a new building. Its western façade completes the street grid, while its northern façade opens onto the central public (and in fact only) public space of Mir, Toscanini Park. We had to comply with much stricter conservation conditions, which required scrupulous respect for the wreath line of the existing park edge and a clear division of the building into lower and terrace parts. Even though the park edge of the existing individual residential buildings is already quite degraded, we saw our project as a reconstruction of the ideal.

While the first building at Mir dealt with the general relationship between the collective and the individual, the second building was primarily concerned with the interpretation and contextualisation of the building additions in relation to the basic, geometrically simple square. The series of geometrically arranged building elements (lodge, portal, canopy, shed and wall) made of brushed white concrete refers to the modernist elements of pre-war Ljubljana architecture, which attempted to radicalise the solidity and rigidity of historically conditioned brick construction with slender elements made of concrete, which was very modern at the time. I am thinking in particular of the works of Franže Tomažič. The white concrete bodies that articulate the city corner and interact with the park are structurally more solid and defined than the haphazardly latticed brickwork of the basic building body. The material relationship, the prominent brushed concrete in relation to the less sturdy thick render, again highlights our ambition to communicate the importance of the individual building elements by using the intended durability and resistance of the material.

The load-bearing structure is fully perimeter, which means that the apartments are able to be fully and long-term flexible according to the needs of each individual user. There are only 6 apartments in the building, as there are two duplex units on the top two floors. Even though the design is axisymmetric, the relatively high degree of customisation of the contents has allowed each dwelling to be a world unto itself. The materials, i.e. shotcrete, thick layer plaster, steel and cement board, are used in a way that honestly and consistently expresses their character and role in the architectural composition.

Even if the apartment building is commercially referred to as Villa Toscanini, which is in fact a kind of absurdity, since a villa is a building type that embodies and represents only one owner, through its design we are still left wondering what more architects can do in the design of a multi-apartment building to reinterpret the fading character of the Mirja villa district through the articulation of its architectural links.

Authors of the project: BLENKUŠ Matej, CIMPERMAN Katja, CVETREŽNIK Anja, VALENČIČ Grega