Panelák Rimavská Sobota (SL)

Ateliér A4 and gutgut architects

Authors

  • Olv Klijn TU Delft, Architecture and the Built Environment

Abstract

Many suburbs of former Eastern Bloc cities still look like concrete jungles, built during the decades of Soviet reign in which the post-war housing shortage was addressed on a large scale. There is no place with a higher concentration of these structures in the former Soviet Bloc than in both countries in the area formerly known as Czechoslovakia. The prefabricated residential blocks, locally known as paneláky – a word that means ‘panel houses’ in both Czech and Slovak – still, decades after the fall of the Iron Curtain, determine the DNA of the cities in many ways. This is also the case in Rimavská Sobota.

Now, with the arrival of the market economy, new ideas about architecture and urbanism are arising. The most obvious way to realize those new concepts seems to be the radical demolition of socialist residential blocks. From an economic and sustainable point of view, however, that solution is far from ideal. After all, from the perspective of sustainable urban development, it is much smarter to reuse existing buildings for as long as possible. gutgut architects design shows that this can also be an interesting architectural alternative.

Author Biography

Olv Klijn, TU Delft, Architecture and the Built Environment

Olv Klijn is Assistant Professor at Delft University of Technology and founder and partner of FABRICations. Klijn studied architecture at Eindhoven University of Technology and graduated Cum Laude. Klijn has written articles for various architecture magazines, including de Architect, and worked as a junior architect for OMA in Rotterdam. Klijn is (co) author of various books such as VMX Agenda, 10 x Den Bosch, Station Centraal, Architect by accident and The making of ... After founding FABRICations in 2007 with Eric Frijters, he has been involved in the design and research of architecture, urban design and regional strategies. In 2010, FABRICations won the first prize in the Prix de Rome Architecture.  In 2011, Klijn was recognized as one of the 40 emerging European architects under the age of 40. A year later he was nominated for the Iakov Chernikhov International Architecture Prize.

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Published

2018-06-01

How to Cite

Klijn, O. (2018). Panelák Rimavská Sobota (SL): Ateliér A4 and gutgut architects. DASH | Delft Architectural Studies on Housing, 9(14), 140–147. Retrieved from https://journals.open.tudelft.nl/dash/article/view/5080