Olomouc - Hejčín

Author: Karin Krettková
Co-author: Karin Krettková, Tereza Pavlíčková, Marek Nečesal, Tomáš Müller, Matteo Marchese

Year of foundation: 2020

Brno University of Technology
Faculty of Architecture
Department of Experimental Design
Degree: Bachelor
Year of studies: 3
Artwork supervisor: mgr inź. arch Szymon Rozwalka

The twentieth century was marked by a never-ending lament over urbanism. The principles of the old urbanists were mummified, rediscovered and exhibited in a loop. Staring into their telescopes, urbanists forgot to look around and the city got away from them. Now it's up to us to pick up the baton and score. But the pin we have been given is quite different from that of our predecessors. We are entering a race that cannot be won, we are both tortoise and hare. The starting gun has fired and we're still lying in the grass. The goal can only be achieved if we know what lane we are running in and which direction. It is no longer possible to design a city by determining its exact shape and predicting its life decades in advance. The contemporary style is not made up of a single thread, but a mass whose particles are constantly interacting, colliding, absorbing and translating. To map this system and propose its reorganization in a usable time is impossible. The time of the builders is over, now it is time to take the helm and start looking for a new direction. We need to figure out a new form of regulation and a new set of the regulated.

Vive l'individualité! The present age lacks a unifying direction. With globalization, time-space distance becomes a triviality, nourishing the infinite plurality that alone defines our times. The speed of construction, modernization and innovation is dizzying. Designing specific types, forms and capacities of urbanism is not an appropriate solution in a fluid age. Taking into account the length of construction, the sale of properties and the subsequent birth of vitality in the locality, i.e. the final establishment of the proposed system in contrast to the speed of change of trends in society, the risk of the proposed system being outdated when it is first launched seems quite clear. For the conditions under which it was designed may, in the twinkling of an eye, be quite different from those of the building.

In the heat of the melting Bauman shackles, humanity is beginning to suffer from preservation fever. Everything old must be preserved, and representations of the present must be squeezed into gaps, or preferably cleared away to parts of the city that have lain fallow. Don't demolish anything! But this is not true of the heritage of the second half of the twentieth century. At the mere mention of the architecture of socialism, the ordinary citizen becomes a Bradbury fireman. We see the validation of objects and their suitability for conversation based on the time of their construction as inadequate and inappropriate. Conservation, reconstruction and renovation should be approached primarily on the basis of indicators of potential and the degree of irrigation necessary to bring the object into use. If the object can achieve the qualities that develop the surrounding area when preserved, it makes sense to preserve it. Otherwise, sentiment must be discarded!

New Urbanism directs an endless game. Instead of determining the final solution, it seeks an answer to the urban question by using the maximum involvement of the actors of the free game. We only make corrections using the necessary number of regulations. The basis of the system is the determination of the character of the development in terms of the ratio of the size of service areas, amenities and residential units on the plot. Using the win-win method, developers are then incentivized to create a more vital public space and greening of the city, a concrete application is demonstrated in a draft regulatory plan for a part of Hejčín.