Some say it looks like a sphinx, others compare it to wealthy factory owners' functionalist villas. As it sits on the Barbořina hill, right above the town of Kroměříž, it certainly could be many things, just not ordinary. For the then thirty-year-old architect Svatopluk Sládeček, this villa was one of his very first projects. 

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.

The new footbridge connecting Prague’s Karlín and Holešovice districts forms a delicate spatial curve—based on the pedestrian and cyclists movement. The bridge deck is supported by two abutments at the opposite banks, two piers on the Štvanice island for minimum impact, and two more piers in Vltava’s non-navigable side channel. A ramp running parallel to the edge of the island connects the footbridge to Štvanice. On the Holešovice side, the footbridge slopes down to the level of the sidewalk, even going below flood water levels. This section is designed to be movable vertically, with a hydraulic ram pump in the last pier to lift the bridge above the 1000-year flood mark. The bridge is made from ultra-high performance fiber-reinforced concrete (UHPFRC) with a smooth, white marble-like finish.