Municipal centre in Vodice

In the award’s justification, the competition jury wrote: “The solution seeks to complete the area of the old village centre of Vodice by reproducing the concept of a spontaneous settlement pattern. The existing built structures are thus subtly complemented by new buildings, which in their own way summarise the logic of the village space. The basic guiding principle of the entire intervention in the space is to create a balance between the two structural interventions: the town-urban and the village, which the authors achieve by creating smaller and hierarchically structured open spaces.

The buildings of the Kopitar Centre are articulated and thus adapted to the scale of the existing built structure and remain subordinate to the church dominance. The clustered layout builds on the existing quality of the ambience, stopping and opening views, following landmarks and movement through the space. The outdoor spaces are linked into a conglomerate of linked squares, avenues, parks and other public outdoor areas. This creates a new dimension of place, which the jury recognised as a contemporary composition of urban-rural design.

However, the area of the new centre, with its associated very urban exterior, puts the whole area, including the church, on a common denominator. The result is a seemingly chaotic space that exceeds the scale of Vodice, as the potential of the place’s life does not reach the capacity of the public space that is created between the buildings. At the same time, the buildings are too basic in their design and resemble a residential neighbourhood rather than a meaningful and cultural centre of the place.

In contrast to the new town centre, the residential part of the area is very sensibly designed, which is linked to the existing built-up structure at the edges, but otherwise also follows spontaneous settlement patterns based on the views in the surrounding area, thus linking to motifs that already exist in the area (the historic built-up area along Vodiška, the village character from the church to the new parish church). The modern interpretation of the traditional design of grouping buildings creates a special, inimitable whole of small, varied clusters of residential buildings. The buildings, grouped in rows, appear in space as longer gabled volumes, which also derives from local motifs of historic dwellings and farmhouses.

By comparing the individual competition solutions, the present competition opens up a number of perspectives and highlights views on the design principles of town and village centres of smaller settlements. In any case, the introduction of new functions on a larger scale, such as a cultural hall and a hypermarket, is usually invasive to the otherwise normal scale of a place. The competition judged as more appropriate those proposals that create a distance, a larger open space or a vegetated caesura between the dominant church and the dense conglomerate of new functions. It is certainly safer, less risky and much more manageable. But it retains the bitter taste of the lesson of modernism. The free placement of self-contained, spaced-out bodies in a seemingly neutral space primarily emphasises the objects, but overlooks the significance of the space between them, the urban space of the growth, interplay and intertwining of historical layers.

Authors: BLENKUŠ Matej; CIMPERMAN Katja; FLORIJANČIČ Miloš; PIKELJ Andreja; CVETREŽNIK Anja; KOBAL Vita