Multi-apartment building at Dunajska cesta

The layout plan for the northern part of Vienna Road, adopted in the early 1990s, was based on the bold visual-spatial assumption that a relatively low, compact, mixed-use row of buildings would be located along the city’s most important entrance road, while the cross streets would allow for higher densities and storeys. Unlike the usual urban design of major arterial roads, where the street corridor is defined by a uniform series of relatively tall parallel buildings, a different, less uniform design could be followed along Vienna Road. The commercial and retail amenities would be oriented to the street, while the apartments would be arranged in a rectangular orientation, with a primary orientation to the south, and would also be less affected by street noise. In the 1990s, some major buildings were built in accordance with this urban plan, but the pressure from landowners along the inlet was increasingly directed towards promoting and tolerating the logic of market and pragmatic urbanism, which unfortunately turned the initial logic completely upside down, step by step.

The majority of the building is occupied by flats, which vary considerably in terms of their primary orientation and position in the building. The lower row along Dunajska Street is filled with smaller, single-sided apartments with a rear access corridor. The main body of the building is a six-storey lamella perpendicular to Dunajska Street, with mainly bilaterally oriented apartments. Duplexes and even triplexes with access to the building from the terrace floor also appear on the upper floors.

The façade envelope is constructed with solid brick, and the façade pattern features a number of grid patterns that communicate to the passer-by that the brick is not part of the masonry, but acts as a protective envelope. The building structure intersects in different ways at the intersection of the two main geometric axes, the street or city corner is expressed through the double-speak of material, geometry and weight. The articulation of the contact gave the building its name, the Vienna Corner.

The northern part of Ljubljana, at the junction with the city ring road, has been transformed into a t. i. “uptown”. In key locations, new buildings have sprung up in the last decade that radically overturn the original urban plan. With each new building, the “Vienna Corner” is losing more and more of its urbanistic origin, its distinctive design lost in the heterogeneity of new urban interventions.

Authors of the project: BLENKUŠ Matej, FLORIJANČIČ Miloš, STUDEN Marko