Vier Häuser in einem: Villa Reden in Chorzów von Maciej Franta

Remains of mines are to be seen everywhere in the Upper Silesian coal mining area around Katowice. The same applies to the eastern margin of Chorzów, where Maciej Franta and his architectural team recently completed Villa Reden: the concrete headframe of the former “Prezydent” (President) coal mine looms up not far away, and a black painted wooden church relocated in 1935 from the town of Knurów stands nearby to the north of the new building. Many solid middle-class homes from the interwar period are located in the immediate vicinity, a good deal of them with curved walls and balconies.
Maciej Franta has taken all these influences and expressed them in the design of the new building with its unusual ground plan concept. The binding construction plan only permitted detached houses in the quarter. Thus instead of single-storey apartments as usual, the villa contains four separate houses, each with its own entrance and staircase and each made up of two 75-square-metre apartments, one above the other. The apartments account for the building’s upper floors, the ground floor having been left largely empty apart from the circulation core. Circumferential wood-clad balconies tie the polygonal volume together into a homogenous, oval-shaped whole. Both floor-to-ceiling terrace doors and an inner light well introduce natural light into the four houses, which, with the exception of the staircases, were erected as reinforced concrete framed structures with filigree ceilings and filled spaces in brick. A steel skeleton structure supports the site-cast concrete terraces clad above and below in wood.
The architects took great pains to lend the different materials a uniform look. The reinforced concrete slab ceilings have been left exposed but only in the apartments. The outer walls with thermal composite insulation were rendered in black, tone in tone with the black matte paintwork of the outer steel skeleton structure. To achieve coherence of the various elements and lend them the same visual effect, four different finishes in four different technologies found use on four different materials.