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awards
K - 7 Tomáš Jiránek, David Prudík
Author:
Zámecký park ve Ctěnicích
Locality:
Praha 1
Category:
Landscape and garden architecture
Evaluation:
Awards

Based on the investor's demands to reconstruct the original villatic residence with a yard wedged between the economic wing of the building and the house to a family residence fully corresponding to the demands of a large family and of the twenty-first century, and the contiguous garden to a hinterlan for free time with an undemanding and easy maintenance, high usefulness and aestheticaly interesting, I've tried to create the following ilusion.

The villatic residence was built on the foundations of the original medieval homestead whose remainders are still noticable at several places. Original old-time pillar columns even nowadays majesticaly gripp the front gate , remainders of the peripheral walls where rock plants crawl on their disintegrating tops and here and there some seeding wood crouches, a small backyard and also ruins of some residence, nowadays serving as a transitionally patio from the living room to the water biotop. (used plaener stone from the economic wing demolition)

Behind the front gate there spreads a quadrangle creating a natural crossroad of the everyday rush, sufficienly planted with greenery and decorated with a range of artefacts, for its calm image. From here you can liveably enter the workroom and the Family provider office, the economic shelter, the open garage, from where you can enter the house or go to the garden, and through the gate and gateway to go out to the street or over the backyard with a barrierless slip road enter the house through its front door.

From the space behind the door with built in dressing wardrobe you get through the passage to the garage or the office of the lady of the house with one door and with the second door you get to the space from where you can get to the cellar, or to the bathroom and from here to the laundry room and through the open entrance to the connected living, kitchen and dining part of the house which are seperated only imaginarily by the remaiders of the original walls in the way that there have been formed fascinating openings among the original rooms. From the residential part you come to two-armed stairs, under its upper arm there is effectivelly wedged a closeable woodshed, on the first floor there are situated three rooms for children, a bedroom, a dressing room, the second bathroom and a toilet and here you should notice the entire using of the attic space which isn't devalued by "cheap" ceiling, but the space over the roof ties is transformed in to open store shelves. The roof ties which aren't used are left free in the space and set off as against the rest of the casing by a dark colour. And then a stone bed, built bed tables of bricks and shelves with built in spotlights corresponding to multimedial wall of bricks separating the bedroom itself from the wardrobe.

At the foot of the stairs there is a "French" window and through it you can easily go from the living room across the stone patio to a private pond which was arising in the depression of the sandstone rock massif for long years. Its natural majestic character was seized from the surrounding landscape and shackled with a peripheral wall from where is no escape possible. The last possibility may be only the gate for the entry of a possible service which can be only a poor compensation for the lost freedom.

In fact it is a fancifully arranged low energetic water biotop(200m/2 water surface, 220m/3, 160cm max. depth). Its case and rock massif extending over the terrain is "in quation marks" only a ferroconcrete shell. But then its heart is an underground storage reservoir(58m/3). All pluvial water from the roofs of the homestead(600m/2), which is the main source, is led down to this place. With the overflow keeping the constant water level in the biotop, it is seperated with a gravelly filter, which is separating the reservoir to two halves, from the other mechanism. To the fitered water outfalls as a spare source an exit of the well. For the case of overfilling the reservoir during abundant raining(e. g. at the beginning of spring after heavy snowy winter) there is an overfall of the sanitation. From this chamber single branches of water streams(in this case three) go away throught the cellar, where there is a simple control of the flow, to the various parts of the biotop meeting the function of biological filtres and oxygenating. For non-problematic working of the natural self-refining processes only one submergible pump caterring the permanent circulation suffices. The remaining two ones serve "in this case" to water the roller coaster which mainly the kids crew in the house will appreciate, and to water two waterfalls "delightful for eyes" but they mainly constitute a spare source for oxygenating in hot summer days. The single pumps are controlled by buttons located on facade at the patio. We shouldn't forget to mention the classical country-house lavatory where there is a hidden flushing toilet watered with the water from the biotop.

The pond isn't let out in winter so we may ice skate there and if you sprinkle the roller coaster with water, you make a heap of kids joy. Well, the garden can be used all over the year, there is undemanding maintainance because if it's wildly overgrown, it just gets its connaturality, and at the end I would to say this garden is aestheticaly "well done".

(14.04.2008)