A new community project from No Architects, located in the heart of the Czech Republic’s Ore Mountains, creates residential holiday accommodation from an overlooked and abandoned structure.
Once home to a substantially German-speaking population, these mountains in the north-west of the country became sparse and empty after post-1945 expulsions. This is the former Sudetenland, once a flashpoint in 20th-century history, now finding a fresh identity as part of the Czech Republic.
Resurrection of the Sudetenland, No Architects
This project breathes new life into a formerly abandoned structure, one of many thousands in the hundreds of abandoned villages in the region. After the war, the structure had enjoyed life as family mountain accommodation, part of what was then Czechoslovakia’s network of summer camps. The building had housed a ski club, with add-ons and accretions gradually overwriting the original character and features.
A covered area unites the old and new houses
The covered space
No Architects – Jakub Filip Novák, Daniela Baráčková, Klára Rašková, Lenka Juračková, and Jana Kutáček Sedlická – set out to bring the structure back to life, emphasising the heroic qualities of the architecture whilst also matching demanding modern standards of energy use.
‘We decided to definitively abandon the line of melancholic nostalgia and the superficial mountain romanticism’
No Architects
The restored house at dusk
‘We decided to definitively abandon the line of melancholic nostalgia and the superficial mountain romanticism for self-indulgent tourists,’ say the architects. ‘We therefore wanted to break away from the myth of an eternally abandoned and decaying region.’
The traditional façade of the restored house
Consolidating the additions that had sprung up across the meadows over the decades, No Architects pared the visible building back to the restored original house connected to a radically overhauled structure to by a single-storey link structure. ‘What didn't fit, we mercilessly buried in the slope so that only a single farmstead remained on the slope from the pile of houses,’ the architects say.
The complex in the summer landscape
The images are elegant but deceptive, for summers are short here and winters can be long and brutal. It snows around 100 days of the year and average annual temperatures are around 4°C. Then there’s the rain – which falls at more than twice the average rate for the country. The landscape is swathed in fog for around a third of the year, so a house must be a robust refuge against the environment, whilst also guarding against the temptation of prolific energy consumption.
Heat is collected from a ground source pump buried in the meadow surrounding the house, with underfloor heating throughout. Water is drawn from a new well, and a newly restored pond also re-shapes the landscape and drainage.
The whole complex is designed to be operated remotely. ‘Everything in the house, from cameras to lights and locks to window blinds, can be controlled remotely under a complex integrated system controlled via a satellite connection to civilization,’ say the architects.
Inside, the use of timber, terrazzo, and ceramic tiles add colour and texture to the white painted walls and ceilings, paired with hard-wearing wooden furniture and staircases. As a vacation space, the apartments have simple sleeping areas consisting of ladder-accessed lofts and bunkbeds, and the durable aesthetic is also carried over into the caretaker's house.
The choice of white for walls and new steel roofs was radical, extending even to the colour of the gravel for the access roads, mixed with local Ora Mountain stone. The new finishes are described as a ‘gleaming white steel suit,’ bolstering the performance and stability of the structure.
Resurrection of the Sudetenland, No Architects
Although the Midsommar vibes are strong in these atmospheric images, which capture the building at the height of summer awash with the traces of past and future occupancy, the end project is designed to be robust, warm and for a life of hard and loving use.
According to the architects, ‘[the project is for] even the most demanding visitors – boisterous children who happily run around wildly, their hair covered in smoke, their fingers sticky with resin, and occasionally holding some beautiful natural object in their hands.’
Resurrection of the Sudetenland, No Architects
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