Park²

Prefabricated housing estates are not stigmatized in our context, nevertheless they still do not receive enough attention. Residents are dissatisfied with living there because of the lack of parking spaces. My work aims to present a catalogue of possible approaches and visions, that can be cumulated or adapted, for each estate, or elsewhere within the city. For my specific case study, I am operating with a deficit of 2000 spaces. Comparing the effectiveness of my solutions I intend to improve the closer environment. Is the value of a parking lot also the value of the public space it occupies?

I am limiting car traffic through the estate. The horizontal slabs of the modernist complex are complemented with subtle steel car towers, responding to the unused blank side walls of the prefabricated buildings. Alongside the rotary system, I place sunrooms for the edge flats or extend the width of loggias for the whole building. Book booths, delivery or bike boxes can be built on the ground floor. Above the underground garages I build low, wooden pavilions with green roofs, densifying the concrete housing structure. The community yards serve as a creative platform. I hierarchize the unmaintained green space between the blocks into a central public park, semi-private yards and meadows. I create a diverse and fluid space, turning the street into a shared space. The planted trees and front gardens penetrate the built-up area as we leave the forest. The connection with the rest of the settlement on the main urban axis is emphasised by alleys. I place the parking structure on the periphery, at the entrance of the estate. I designed it for possible conversion. The edifice can be dismantled to create two atria for an office building. The façade is made of a suspended metal grating. The south side features perforated sheet metal, with signs by Jiří Rathouský. The latter plays a functional role for shading, while adding detail and character, based on the graphic design of Jižní Město II. In the conversion, the cladding is recycled, for sunshades. The remainder is made of a curtain wall, as a modern analogy to the prefabricated concrete panels. Each solution brings different benefits and reveals other problems of the estate. In total I added 1200 parking spaces and redefined 1.2 ha of green space. The work is a guidebook on how to deal with parking and public space.