uRED Architecture

The POS Residential Building in Kraljevica, Croatia, is a part of an innovative architecture program promoted by the Ministry of Public Works of Croatia, to provide affordable, yet market-based housing for young families.

The site for the 17-apartment-unit building in this small town near Rijeka, on the northern Adriatic coast, is a residue from the previous cycle of “collective” housing schemes. The typical 4-story buildings with protruding balconies and central stairway for two apartments per floor were built periodically by the local shipyard in the second half of the 20th century.

The architecture of the proposed building, to be constructed in 2003, distinguishes itself from the conventions of the collective residential architecture of the socialist past. It is also translates the prevailing local residential configurations, based on houses with gardens that are conducive to the typical Mediterranean living in the exterior.

Moreover, the massing of the building is “learning” from the solid, large-scale volumes of the historical architecture of the two monumental castles, as well as from the large scale of the ships being built in the shipyard. The two wings of the proposed building are forming the front yard with gardens, and the vertical wing is extending its interiors onto the terraces.

The apartment units are predicated on a strict program with detailed dimensional and functional requirements. The rigidity of the residential requirements is accepted at face value, as a mathematical algorithm that is strictly enforced almost to the point of automation. The modular digital drawing board is used as a tool to lay out the plans, sections and elevations. The idea of a square module is pushed to its limits.

Shielded from the bura--the northern wind, the building creates its own inner sanctum while keeping the maximally slender contours in order not to over whelm the neighbors. The northern facades are less perforated; the southern ones have glazed loggias/winter gardens that double as additional residential space in the colder seasons.