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Text description provided by the architect. In an area of the former suburbs of Ljubljana, where bourgeois houses built between the two world wars stand an unusual mixture. The original house has a cubic volume typical of early 1930s modernism, with semi-circular edges and sparse detailing that continues into the garden and its modern addition – a lightweight floating pavilion. The pavilion uses the curvature of the original volume as a formal starting point, but we can see in its expression a clear continuity with the work of Ljubljana-based architecture studio Ofis. When client and architect first met, the house was far from its former glory.
A renovation in the 1980s, which added a classic pitched roof to the original flat roof, caused the building to lose much of its former elegance. The first part of the renovation was to restore the house’s original qualities. The roof was removed and a smaller terrace floor was added, organically completing the existing volume. The main architectural challenge of the renovation was the connection of the house to its extensive garden, which is more than twice the size of the building’s footprint.
The original house was not functionally connected to the garden, as its ground floor was elevated and relatively closed, with no direct exit to the garden. For this, the architects strayed away from the usual solutions and designed a columnar loop that is an extension of the living room and doubles as a garden pavilion. The new addition is a cross-shaped corridor that borders the garden with the inner “Zen” atrium, but at the same time gradually descends to connect the interior of the villa with the open garden to the south of the hotel.
The extension uses and reinterprets some classic modernist themes such as architectural promenades, ramps, transparency and free-form floor plans. The newly created circular route is widened into two spaces with two different atmospheres. In the glazed part of the colonnade, on the north-south visual axis, it cuts across the entire floor plan between the passage and the garden, thus connecting the old and the new, located in a slightly raised living room. Just above the lawn, facing south, is a completely open garden pavilion, enclosed only by columns and curtains.
The result of a challenging eight-year process, the house becomes an example of a clear and witty dialogue between two architectural languages from two eras, connected into a coherent whole by the architects with a keen sense of the building’s hidden qualities. architectural composition. Existing building.
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