The workshop was initiated by Ján Stempel and Jan Jakub Tesař, long-time teachers of our faculty and the Department of Architectural Design I. They are behind, for example, the publication of three volumes of 99 Houses, which presents the most remarkable family houses built in the last 20 years in the Czech Republic, as well as two books entitled Family Houses, in which they present their projects. They devised a project that would allow sharing experiences across regions and asked their colleagues from the Faculty of Architecture at the Slovak Technical University in Bratislava, Martin Kusý and Pavol Paňák, to collaborate. They also invited the prominent architect Gabriela Kaprálová from the ASGK Design studio and a colleague from the department, Pavel Ullmann, to independently oppose the student designs.
The workshop programme started with a research of the land in Jevany, for which the houses were designed. Next, they visited eight houses in Prague and its surroundings in various stages of construction by Stempel & Tesař, Martin Čeňek, Jan Jelínek or Lennox architects. Thanks to the kindness of the owners, it was possible to not only admire these otherwise inaccessible houses from the outside, but also to visit them.
On the following days, the students were divided into six groups of three and their task was to design a set of six buildings for a 15,000 m2 plot in a record time of 5 days that would fit together, complement each other and at the same time meet the requirements of their investors. In addition to support and feedback during the final presentation, the organisers also prepared lectures on family houses in the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
The resulting research of the individual villas can be seen in the publication that was produced after the workshop. The Department of Architectural Design I would like to thank the management of the faculty for the financial support of the event and for helping us when the Budapest University of Technology and Economics BME withdrew and the project lost the possibility of funding from the BIP Erasmus.
