authors: Boris Redčenkov, Prokop Tomášek, Jaroslav Wertig
cooperation: ing.arch. Vítězslav Danda, ing.arch. Michal Nohejl
investor: private person
volume: 30 mil. Kč
photographer: vizualizace: Michal Nohejl

House – villa in the traditional garden suburb

para- - (prefix) - beside, along, near, through, contrary, past
parallax - (from Greek parallaxis) meaning “alteration”; visual angle; the angle of two lines directed from two spatially different places to the observed point.
The site of the building is a stable urban unit with completed development. The regular order of streets and solitaire villas in gardens establishes a paradigm in which the mutual visual supervision of plots, gardens, confrontation of views of opposite

windows forms an accepted standard.
How to support your own identity in such a rigid system? And how to avoid the feeling of mutual control and neighbourhood paranoia?
All it takes is the change of the visual angle. Stay in place, respect the position of a solitaire building in the garden, respect the construction line, only turn against the orthogonal system and relate to the diagonal directions. The diagonal directions are not confronted with opposite facades. They offer free space for distant views. The change of the parallax

provides disengagement and freedom.
The house is a cross-breed of a villa and an apartment house. It combines seemingly incompatible – efficiency and a concentrated character of an apartment house with the sense of autonomy and privacy of a villa.
The cross-breeding is applied to the mass concept too. The arms of the cross diagonally turned on the plot are almost solitaire like towers serried round the traffic core.
The design of the typological paradox is

characterised by wilful negation. The more intensive the coexistence of flats is, the more intensive the feeling that it is not so should be. Four flats mingle in the mass of the house and pass each other as if in a sophisticated puzzle. They form independent parallel micro-worlds.
The cross layout offers multiple possibilities of openings, view directions, corner positions. The layout which strictly separates the social and intimate part of the flats then offers a number of surprising moments. The light and the space undulate through

the interior as if along an open folding screen. The multiple through views create richer dimensional impression.
The important factor for definition of the flats is their relation to the external world. The mass of the house portions the garden to autonomous recesses to which individual flats are oriented and connected. The possibility to walk out to the garden or the terrace is one of the attributes of villas. Gardens are filters to neighbourhood. The intimacy of garden recesses is strengthened by firm back of inner corners of

the cross. These contrast with the extrovert faces covered by the changeable system of external screens. These regulate light and distance views.
Rather than changing the reality it may be more efficient to change the view of it – parallax.