Complex of five apartment blocks

The complex of apartment blocks with a total capacity of 90 flats was built according to the project produced by the architects Jan Aulík and Jakub Fišer in the sloping terrain in the Jihlava suburbs, in close continuity with the older housing estate from the 1950s. It consists of five detached buildings unified in style, each with a simple rectangular floor plan and a pitched roof, which the architects chose in accordance with the city regulations and which also corresponds to the slope of the plot. While house nos. 4933–4936 are aligned one behind the other along the winding Zátopkova Street, Aulík and Fišer placed building no. 4937 on the opposite side of the curve and pushed it slightly out of the flock of apartment blocks towards Pavlova Street. Each of the blocks was provided with its own driveway, which lines the northern entrance façade and also creates space for outdoor parking. These five-storey apartment blocks usually have four flats per floor, with the exception of the ground floor which always has two wheelchair accessible flats with their own front garden under the windows. The flats located under the pitched roof are also atypical as they are vertically raised.

The architects designed all the apartment buildings as simple, snow-white rectangular blocks. The northern, eastern, and western façades were conceived in a flat and rational way, while the southern façade featured a wooden feature wall – a tasteful, exuberantly added slatted rhythmic front panel. In practical terms, it serves as a screen covering a set of balconies and providing privacy and protection from the sun and overheating of the building. From an artistic point of view, the feature wall can be seen as a new, vertically slatted rhythmic layer of the building, whose transparency and aesthetic effect changes with the angle from which the building is being looked at. The architects attached impregnated spruce slats to galvanized steel profiles. The slat grid, and especially the profiles, change concurrently with the height of the building depending on the level of sunlight illuminating each floor. This additional building layer precedes the main structure and also exceeds it on both sides. This creates a generous outdoor dwelling area that exceeds not only the fixed outline of the building, but also the boundaries of deep-rooted ideas about the limits of the living area of a dwelling unit.

The northern façade was accentuated with dark oak wood, but this time in the form of a flat wall facing without joints and only at the parterre level. In addition, a canopy with a wooden soffit runs along the entire length of the entrance frontage, covering the front door and the entrance to the four garages. At the parterre level, the architects also applied a typographic information system, which distinguishes the individual buildings within the entire residential complex by means of colours, letters, and numbers, and marks the entrances to the garages. Aulík and Fišer also used this information system, including its distinctive colour scheme, in the interior of each building (for example, at the level of the entrance wall with letterboxes, for the hydrant signs, and electrical cabinets). In addition, the northern, eastern, and western frontages are punctuated by rectangular windows, laid both vertically and horizontally, which are connected by belts of grey plaster creating the impression of strip windows. Just under the edge of the sloping roof, the architects placed a strip of windows lined with sheet metal, which creates the impression of a modern frieze. Mainly thanks to the use of simple architectural forms, wooden cladding, the motif of the front terrace structure, and the typographic information system, parallels can be drawn between the complex of five apartment blocks on Zátopkova Street and the three years younger Jihlava project carried out by the architects Aulík and Fišer on Na Dolech Street (2003–2004).

AB