Multi-apartment building at Dunajska cesta

The apartment building is located north of the motorway ring, along Dunajska Road in Ljubljana. Its location is very interesting, as it occupies the entire building island, oriented to the east and west. Building a housing programme along a major urban thoroughfare is a major challenge, as living conditions are generally poor, highly exposed to noise and unattractive views of the surrounding traffic. The design of the residents’ semi-public space, which directly faces the street profile, is also challenging from a security and surveillance point of view. The building must be urban, but at the same time offer a wide variety of structurally very diverse housing.

In the design of the Mosaic, the two characters of the peripheral streets were recognised and strongly exploited structurally. The eastern façade of the building opens onto a busy entrance road, while the western façade opens onto a quiet internal street and surrounding detached individual buildings with gardens, but the depth of the island is too great to allow all the apartments to be oriented bilaterally and to combine all the boundary conditions.

In addition, the urban planning required the building to be articulated or interrupted by caesurae several times along its length. The result is a mosaic of one- and two-sided apartments with deep loggias and a predominantly western orientation, and larger two- and three-sided eastern apartments with intermediate terraces. The one-and-a-half storey height of the eastern flats also results in an interesting cross-sectional interplay, as the storeys do not align with each other at all levels. The terrace, which is set further inland, has larger apartments oriented on two sides.

Intermediate notches in the building volume are primarily intended to improve internal illumination in the depth of the building body, but also to provide better conditions for noise protection. The triangular overhang on the main city façade is also designed as an acoustic reflective barrier, protecting the lower part of the window openings from the direct impact of traffic.

The entrance to the building is via a semi-dome mezzanine into two central staircases, one of which is designed as a public “arcade” through the building. The two-storey service outlets on the ground floor of the facade along Vienna Road establish the urban scale and give the house a more public character. The façade is clad in black ceramics, arranged in partially random but repeating patterns. The structured surface of the façade helps to break up the noise in the intervening caissons and thus prevents it from penetrating deep into the façade.

The project also features a redesign of the street profile of the city’s entrance road, with the green space separating the carriageway from the cycle track and pavement moved to the outermost edge. The original design profile called for a green space as a dividing line between the public and private areas of the apartment building, and the rotation allows the space to be wider, safer and more inclusive for both passers-by and the building’s occupants.

With this project, we wanted to highlight a point of view that we believe in wholeheartedly. Multi-residential buildings, regardless of their location, status and economic class, represent t. i. an anonymous urban fabric that defines its basic morphology and establishes a more or less uniform continuity of street and square features. The display of excessive uniqueness, exclusivity and design excess is simply not appropriate for this typology, as it destroys the basic relationship between the general and the particular.

authors of the project: BLENKUŠ Matej, FLORIJANČIČ Miloš