Man changes the character of the landscape as a result of using it. Landscape renewal is a protracted and expensive process, always requiring the participation of many professions whose opinions quite often differ. On the one side, there are defenders of biotechnical reclamation forms, on the other side, there are advocates for natural, nature-friendly procedures. How can an architect contribute to the whole process?

It may be seen more in our neighbors across the borders than here that some people don’t just wish for a family house with a fenced-in garden any more. They don’t want to be locked up in their own world, to be separated on their property with their troubles, they want to share things though, share and collectively live through certain moments of life while having an option to keep their privacy. They want to live in a city, in the center of everything, but in their own way. At least they are saving space in a city and together with architects trying to exploit the potential of the given lot to be able to respond to a change of situation in time. We have asked ourselves a number of questions that we would like to know the answers to.

A stone house in a settlement called v Chaloupkách from the early 1900’s was built on a typical rectangular plan with a central axis and two rooms. Carried out as a diploma project along with a project of a tea house in the garden, the conversion preserves the house’s original character. The new volume comes through the center of the old house and literally hammers light into it. A cross connection of two houses, similar in shape but completely different in materials, creates a harmonically contrastive whole that is enhanced by the spatial arrangement concept and many details pervading the whole house as small surprises.

The information revolution, global as well as local, expands the physical environment into volatile virtual spheres. The possibilities of a new technological interface blend with current social, environmental, and economical demands, and together they exceed the narrow notion of architecture as a building art. Architecture becomes a medium of an emerging situation, generating, processing and transferring a larger and larger pack of data.

Built in the late 1950’s during Action Z for the purpose of a gillyflowers exhibition, the small structure in the garden of the Dr. Hostaš National Museum in Klatovy has served as a depository and workshop for many years. A subtle transformation into a modern exhibition pavilion is based on cleaning the added historical layers and walling-in the original openings, including the central entrance, which accentuates pure form of the U-shaped structure. In both gables new openings have been made; the asymmetrically placed entrance lets the exhibition flow undisturbed through the pavilion space, a large window in the opposite gable offers a generous view of the garden. The third intervention is to knock a large round skylight in the middle of the pavilion that provides dispersed top lighting. The chosen geometric concept is completed and developed by an organically shaped garden with islands of grass and seats.