House, Mikolow

Our clients are a family of four living in Upper Silesia, which is the industrial region of southern Poland. Their goal was to move to a quieter and bigger place than their present cramped, terraced house. The plot they bought was a large, open, flat piece of land located near a cosy Silesian village of two-storey, flat-roofed brick buildings. The site itself was anonymous, waiting for an architectural intervention that would give it some spatial identity.

The clients' programme was demanding and divided into fragments. Apart from the house itself, they wanted: a detached garage, a swimming pool, a boiler room, an outbuilding, a terrace, a solar battery platform plus a mass of different trees, flower beds, bushes, fruits and vegetables reflecting the housewife's interests. Our main challenge was to devise an urban principle for organizing the architecture and landscape. It needed to provide a coherent and attractive arrangement of the required programme and allow for the possibility of alterations with no loss or damage to the quality of the space.

The solution was to design freestanding cylindrical objects of various diameters and heights for each function, disposed around the plot. In accordance with this principle, the groups of vegetation would also be conceived as cylinders. Lush, evenly cut grass would constitute a background for the ensemble as a whole.

The main house has two floors, a very rigorous layout with elevations of graphite plaster and a stainless steel mesh. Although it will appear cold and brutal on the outside, the inside – finished with white-stained oak – will be calm and cosy. Three bedrooms with a bathroom each, a mini-cinema, a kitchen with a dining room and extremely attractive living room are designed to satisfy all of the occupants' needs. Thanks to steel cantilevers and suspension rods supporting the upper floor, the living room will be devoid of pillars. It will enjoy an uninterrupted panoramic view of the plot through a 21-meter-long opening.

The realization of this project has been a source of much gossip and comment. Looking at the cylindrical structures, some local people joked about a UFO landing field, while others speculated that smokestacks were being built on the plot. But we hope that after completion this project will prove that the suburban space does not have to be as chaotic as it often is elsewhere in Poland.