The second series of our summer visits to famous homes and villas, which have been tried and tested by many years of use, was kicked off by our trip to Vonoklasy near Prague. In the case of this villa by architects Ladislav Lábus and Lenka Dvořáková, an incredible quarter of a century has passed since it was completed.

Timber is a material of the past, but also for the future. That’s certainly something we learned in the ERA21 #02/2022 issue on carbon-neutral architecture, and we get a reminder every year at the Wood Buildings Show in Prague. This year, Do Janne Vermeulen, co-founder of the Dutch architecture studio Team V, attended the show and we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to talk to her. The conversation naturally drifted to the recently completed HAUT building in Amsterdam, one of the tallest hybrid timber buildings in the world.

Built at the Faculty of Education campus at Poříčí, Brno, the new art department studios are finely sculpted, dazzling white boxes stacked on top of each other. But the volumes were arrived at only after considering many external conditions— for example the condition to maintain courtyard access on the ground floor, to keep an energy substation building on site, to provide both solar access requirements for a neighboring property and ample daylight for the studios themselves. The resulting building has three different studio types across three storeys, with three different ceiling-heights.