Conversion of a city block in Ljubljana
Basic information
Project Title
Conversion of a city block in Ljubljana
Full project title
Conversion of a city block in Ljubljana - conversion and revitalization of the city block
Category
Prioritising the places and people that need it the most
Project Description
The project aims to define questions and answers to the problems of city blocks and their functionally
mixed structure. It also examines the human perception of public space and its effect on it. The design
strives to apply principles corresponding to the nature of the environment, material, and cultural context, but also human needs and values embodied in architecture and urban planning.
mixed structure. It also examines the human perception of public space and its effect on it. The design
strives to apply principles corresponding to the nature of the environment, material, and cultural context, but also human needs and values embodied in architecture and urban planning.
Geographical Scope
Local
Project Region
Ljubljana, Slovenia
Urban or rural issues
Mainly urban
Physical or other transformations
It refers to a physical transformation of the built environment (hard investment)
EU Programme or fund
No
Description of the project
Summary
The design of the urban - architectural study of the city block serves as an ideological concept of the reconversion of the historic city block of Ljubljana and at the same time offers possible answers to the problem of thickening city centers, the use of vague urban spaces that have lost their significance. The first part of the proposal deals with the solution of micro urbanism of the inner block, which is currently undergoing many building modifications, which eventually led to its devastation and degradation of the environment. The design of urbanism responds to the naturalness of the urban organism, respects its unique context, and aims to create a natural setting that can become part of the site without compromising its original integrity and character. The second part of the design is an architectural study of the Cultural Center with a theatrical scene, whose idea and concept arose as a result of thinking about densifying the city and using the potential of "empty places" to bring new qualities and a new impulse to life. The process also applies the knowledge from the work of Christopher Alexander and his Language of Patterns, as a theoretical basis. The analytical part and the process of work naturally resulted in the program of the cultural center and theater, as a suitable and missing element of the city, which will create a strong center of activity across different age groups and communities. The organization of the material structure of the individual contents and the division of the program answers the questions of urbanism, specific ideas about the functioning of the site, the quality of the environment, and the creation of a positive geometry of public space. The functional content in the center reflects the idea of thickening within the organization of space and creates the organism of the "city in the city". The term thickening is not meant primarily as a formal, but as content, which brings many new, diverse activities to the area addressed.
Key objectives for sustainability
The reconversion of a city block in the center of Ljubljana is a theme that aims to explore, learn, and discover principles in the approach to intervention in historical structures. I am trying to understand the complexity of the ever-changing organism and to provide it with possibilities for holistic development and adaptation to contemporary life. The intention is to create integrity, authenticity, and continuity in the urban interiors. Main supporting pillars: 1. DEFINING LOCAL CENTRES - the block is made up of many zones whose character, function, and life in them are diametrically opposed. An important procedure was to define these zones, functional and full of life, and their opposite. The less functional ones became the design zones and interventions to exploit the potential of the lost cities. Places that function are not subject to the required change. The rule has become this: if you are going to build a house in a beautiful place, don't do it, build it where beauty can be brought. 2. THE NATURE OF THE AREA - The city is characterized by the fact that the entire downtown is a pedestrian area. This was true even in the inner city areas until it was affected by the devastation of ongoing construction work that was never completed. A healthy city is a city of short distances and allows pedestrians to move from one place to another within a pleasant walking distance. I am creating a new pedestrian axis in the block that intersects the existing arcade at the point where the new cultural and social functions are concentrated. The area will thus become a new link between downtown spaces. 3. DEFINITION OF SPACE, ITS CHARACTER, AND USE - the design of the completion of the block divides the inner block into smaller courtyards whose character is uniform, but this division allows for separate functional use. These spaces are interconnected and their interconnection with the cultural function provides space for the urban development and community activities in time.
Key objectives for aesthetics and quality
To achieve social sustainability and community development, the following ideas were used: 4. ADDITION AND ACTIVITY - the addition of new mass and functions is not only to add density in the sense of adding to the built environment but mainly to help existing buildings and places to strengthen their life, function and positively influence their surroundings through the concentration of new activities. The interplay of functions can result in a well-chosen program keeping a site moving 24 hours a day and can be a catalyst for interaction between different age or social groups. Existing activities can draw attention to new ones, or vice versa. The idea of a cultural center was born out of a personal knowledge of the city, and of the place itself, based on personal experience. The cultural center and the theatre scene are intended to create a living point that will bring vitality to the inner neighborhood, strengthen the local community, and create sufficient space for gathering and for the further development of the site. 5. SPACE OF DEVELOPMENT AND TRANSFORMATION - the internal layout of the culture center reflects the idea that all the spaces are oriented to the exterior and thus together create and influence the life and activities in their surroundings. Many of the rooms are designed so that their capacity, function, and daily routines can be expanded or reduced as needed. The idea is based on the ever-changing needs in society and on the development, narrowing, or expansion of community activities. 6. SUPPORTING FUNCTIONS - the distribution of functions, their interconnectedness, and the public space they define are a set of strong centers. I believe that places that concentrate human activity can create a relationship between a person and a place and, based on memories, preserve its authenticity for the future.
Key objectives for inclusion
One aspect of the concept itself is its intention to create a quality urban, public space. From the street line to the hidden places of the inner blocks, which are left to their own fate in one of the most precious places of testimony to human development, such as urban centers. These valuable but often neglected 'interiors' have the potential to bring back the human activities of different social groups and thus create a sense of belonging to a place. This idea combats the creation of 'zones of exclusivity' in urban centers, where the most valuable spaces belong to everyone equally. The next points of the concept develop the previous ideas: 7. SOLUTIONS RESPECTING THE CONTEXT OF THE PLACE - under this point, we can imagine respect for the height of the surrounding buildings and their hygiene requirements, as well as respect for the local morphology, culture, character, but also the needs and demands, whether building or social. The proposed solutions seek to bring a positive impulse through small interventions so that the final design is precisely that which is completed by life itself. Respect for the height of the surroundings, the laws of the terrain, the strengths and functions of existing centers, and so on, will be reflected in the design of specific buildings and their architectural expression. The building becomes part of public life and the space it defines. 8. TARGET GROUPS - the development of urban places should be based on social interaction. Who is involved in the creation of urban rooms? The process is multi-level and multi-disciplinary and involves three components: public, private, and community sectors. An important step is to involve different age and social or cultural groups and to create an environment that is actually self-created - thus providing a space to interact and enjoy in different ways that is not left to chance but encourage a certain kind of activity that brings all these groups together.
How Citizens benefit
One of the key analyses was to involve the public in gathering data about the site itself. So-called "public interviews" are conversations with random passers-by directly at the future project site. People who move through the city daily, people working in restaurants or other services in the immediate vicinity of the functioning as well as the less functional parts of the site. By asking a variety of questions to the various suggestions directly from the site, we sought to complement the missing language of patterns and to find out how the residents of the city perceive its positives as well as its shortcomings and where they feel themselves to be. Conversations about the site, often on the spot with people who pass through the site daily and don't pay attention to it, helped to draw attention to the porosity of this particular place. Interviewees were willing to share their memories, and experiences associated with particular places and to remind themselves of the connection they have to a place. The topic of the conversations often included ideas about the future functioning of the city center, ideas of an imaginary city, a non-existent space, a heaven after life, a place where our dream self would live. The result was a deeper, but often less exact description of cities, which led us to a greater freedom of imagination. The listing of key passwords and sentences from the interview became material for further analysis as we tried to figure out the reason for our answers, why we answered and talked about those particular things and situations, and why they were important to us. We then worked out patterns that were not paraphrases "A Pattern Language" patterns are inspired by the feeling and intuitive side of things, inspired by social behavior and human preferences and feelings. The patterns served to clarify the idea of what we would like to see as a transformation of the block, what elements we would like to use, and why.
Physical or other transformations
It refers to a physical transformation of the built environment (hard investment)
Innovative character
The task was to spend as much time as possible in a place, to know the place and the life in it in different phases of the day month, or year, to observe the behavior of people and the places they prefer and seek out. In addition, it was an important step to know the elements of the site what environments they create, and how they interact with each other. We distinguished between environments that were positive and human in nature and those that were negative or rejecting and that did not give a friendly impression. The first and second exercises, which I describe in the following chapters, served this purpose, learning how to feel, how to perceive one's emotions but also basic bodily reactions to the space. It is demonstrable that the atmosphere of places and their character influence a person's subconscious mind, his mood, and to a significant extent influence his behavior and life. The search for values is linked to the rediscovery of the feeling side in thinking about places and thus becomes another tool in the creation of living space. The different steps served as a tool for the next design phase, to which we applied several principles and explored their possible future functioning. This method of cognition suppresses the "ego" of the architect in the creation of the living space and allows human intuition and the place itself to emerge.
Disciplines/knowledge reflected
The process of analysis, conception, and subsequent design required a broad multidisciplinary approach, from urban planning, and sociology to typology and design. All of these points entered into the process of data acquisition and analysis. The 'city rooms' themselves are the result of a multidisciplinary collaboration between design and planning professionals and social scientists, architects, sociologists, urban anthropologists, environmental psychologists, urban planners, urban economists, etc. However, these work in a certain hiddenness of everyday life. What enriched our conceptual process was mainly the group collaboration, the interaction with the public, and Christopher Alexander's life's work, which is a body of work on multiple scholarly levels. An important step is to involve different age and social or cultural groups and to create an environment that is actually self-created - thus providing a space to interact and enjoy in different ways that are not left to chance but encourage a certain kind of activity that brings all these groups together.
Methodology used
The project aims to define questions and answers to the problems of city blocks and their functionally mixed structure. It also examines the human perception of public space and its effect on it. In the search for an appropriate approach and possible procedures to deal with the development of these sites, the question arises of what principles and rules can help the city find its natural integrity. In terms of intervention in unique and unrepeatable urban structures, there is an opportunity to rediscover our nature, our inner feelings, and the natural physiological reactions of our bodies. The cognitive method of design, as a process of exploring the human mind, i.e. the processes of perception, thinking, decision-making, and action, together with a sensitive understanding of the individual regularities in the body of the city, can become an effective tool for the recovery of forgotten structures. The individual, as a small but essential and necessary creator of life's space, is thus a tool for himself, and the knowledge of his own needs, reactions, and feelings becomes key in the creation of a quality social environment. The cognitive design process, as well as the urban organism, combines factors that are at first sight difficult to combine. Our own bodies and minds can as an indicator of the quality of the environment in which we find ourselves. The recognition of the feeling side and the perception of reality based on experience, feelings, and unconscious preferences has thus become a language applicable in the design phase. The input data for the beginning of the work were mainly the numerous visits to the selected site. An important step was to become part of it, to become familiar with something that many times only we pass by and observe our physiological reactions to the given atmospheres.
How stakeholders are engaged
Collaboration on the analytical part of the project was also enriching because of the work in groups composed of students of different nationalities. Often identical views on key points of the concept confirmed certain lived patterns of life experience, similarity of thinking and reasoning about movement in space, social interactions, and so on. Despite the differences in national practices, we were able to articulate key ideas that we would like to move the sites forward. The added value was that, despite the overall consensus, it was the subtle nuances that the different nationalities consider themselves natural in their daily lives that brought the concept to life. After all, we are all striving for the same thing, even if we express it in different words. It was important in the proposal to harmonize in the formulation of the words, but once we got to the heart of the matter and the actual enumeration of our "spatial patterns" based on the analyses of the interviews, we found that almost all of our individual texts are identical in content. First and foremost, these were the intention to provide people with a space that would not be primarily following the latest trend, but that was vibrant, safe, welcoming and that had a distinctive charm. Which will be memorable but not intrusive, that is homely yet accessible to everyone who will visit, but not busy. Many of the designs formulate just these intentions, just in a different form, the intention was common from the beginning.
Global challenges
The project deals with issues of urbanity and urban density by designing the revitalization of an unused abandoned city block in the center of Ljubljana. In many cities, we can see a lack of meaningful space management which leads to the emergence of unused abandoned places. In the sense of New European Bauhaus, I see those places as examples of sites that are unbeautiful, unsustainable, and unattractive for people. Creating a methodology of how to deal with those abandoned urban places can help to find the solution for many issues of urban sustainability worldwide. The meaningful space management within our cities will allow us to efficiently use urban territories thus the city growth will not occupy agricultural land which is needed for food production. In this approach, we can see that many up-to-date challenges are connected and overlapping, so even small improvements can help with dealing with many issues.
Learning transferred to other parties
The project brings and develops the methodology of observing, researching, and analyzing urban areas and territories. This methodology is the basic framework for creating the solution for the next urban development, which follows the site-specific issues and offers sustainable solutions for different places and communities. This methodology focuses on an understanding of our environment thus allowing the creation of beautiful and sustainable cities as a result of the collaboration of inhabitants together with experts from different fields.
Keywords
city block conversion/reconversion
sensitive understanding of urban environment
urban interiors and microurbanism
unique urban context and scale
community and social sustainability
