Between Panel Housing Estate and City

The project is a critical answer to the ad-hoc development of post-socialist city. It tries to create an alternative urban approach in finding urban typologies to create diverse neighborhoods.

Every historical period challenges the city according to its own ideologies. Utopian imaginaries of ideal cities overwrite previous urban structures and new relations start to emerge between them. In the context of typical post-socialist city these thresholds are symptomatic spaces of vagueness. Often the only urban rule in these places is the cadaster – an irrational collage of owners developed through time. Here, nothing can define the ownership more than a fence. In these fenced neighborhood, the walking in-between becomes unsystematic, unclear and unsafe. As architects, we don’t live in times anymore, when we can create ideal separated urban enclaves without consequences. We cannot build the ideal city. We can rather focus on the thresholds as characteristic space of questioning our current needs - the dense city of mixed social neighborhoods. Panel housing estate Lomená in the city of Kosice is a complex city structure. Diploma work searches for latently present urban and social relations, which appeared due to the physical urban collision of 19th century military urbanism, garden city and modernist planning. In that sense it follows the principles of Ungers’s dialectic city: it strengthens them or re-modelates them with addition of own contemporary urban layer of recognizable urban principles. In these places the planning can’t be just marking the map, but it needs to define clearly architectural qualities based on existing forms. In anomalous situations housing typologies hybridize and become a compromise between the collective panel house from communist times and low-rise individual houses.