Jan Stolín: Residential Complex Pohřebačka in Opatovice

The era when everything was bought and built here is thankfully over. As incomes grew, people began to leave panel houses in droves to move into the creeping catalog projects that are taking over the suburbs of Czech cities. However, other than having a bit of their own greenery, the culture of living has not improved significantly. Not particularly durable mass construction suffered from thoughtlessly chopped layouts or a lack of public services. All of this makes satellite housing just another dormitory in the greenery, where you cannot recognize your neighbor through the green fences, and you have to go elsewhere for social activities.
The idea of cooperative housing is often directly associated with collective houses here, which does not help its positive reception. Functional and proven models can be found in countries where the quality of architecture is not called into question as often as it is here. After World War II, many Western European countries dealt with the ideas of separating transportation, incorporating greenery, and supporting social relationships, for example, one can mention the Swiss Atelier 5 or Danish architect Jørn Utzon. While the former revered order and visible concrete, Utzon was an advocate for a rural appearance using proven natural materials, which confirms that similar results can be achieved through various means.
Twenty years after the revolution, we have unlearned to mindlessly copy the patterns we saw during our holiday trips abroad. The attempt to create a pleasant and socially functioning environment, which would be light-years away from the carpet bombing of satellite construction, also drove the residential complex project in Opatovice nad Labem, where the Liberec studio of Jan Stolín designed seventy family houses. While today all architects cover their generous projects with references to baroque landscapes, Stolín's design draws from a far more intimate scenery of Gothic paintings, where the landscape serves more as an abstract symbol and creates a neutral background for a story to unfold. The wrinkled landscape with jagged shapes was the forerunner of the first variant with irregular house layouts that would cover the treated area in several carpet layers. Due to excessive waste, the artistic vision of Holl's 'Edge of the City' had to be abandoned in favor of a more compact residential landscape, as known from the Dutch MVRDV.



In the flat landscape between Hradec Králové (5 min.) and Pardubice (12 min.) lies the village of Opatovice nad Labem, on the edge of which, near a pond, is the area being addressed, Pohřebačka. The complex was to be bordered by a road where residents would park their cars near their houses and then just walk around. A semi-public park with a stream was to run through the elongated plot, onto which objects supporting social life (café, playground, lookout tower, etc.) were placed. More than 70 houses were to be built on a relatively small plot, each with its own garden and many small atriums. Despite the high efficiency, the houses offer spatial richness. Due to compact construction, it was necessary to work at several levels, creating a parallel to Liberec's First Republic villas, in which 5-6 families continue to live today. Shared living does not mean that residents' privacy is more visible. The main task is to prevent the further exclusion of residents from satellite neighborhoods who have moved from panel rabbit hutches into green "golden cages". The project by Jan Stolín's studio attempted to overcome the thinking limits of most developers and presented a proposal for affordable housing in a complex supporting neighborhood coexistence.



A reflection of today's times is that the author was not compensated by the client after presenting his six-month work, and he learned about the termination of further cooperation only through an email.