Domino

56,4% of buildings in Slovenia have one to four apartments. Only 12.6% residential buildings are higher than five stories. The rising trend of suburbanization predicts the further expansion of cities. More than half of the citizens who plan to move to a new apartment in the next five years would like to move to the outskirts of the city because of bad living conditions. An apartment is one of the basic human needs and rights, but for many, it is still an unattainable privilege.
Although it is situated near the city center, Pobrežje seems like a separate pocket, bordered by the highway, the cemetery, and the abandoned dump. It has never been completely urbanized and is fragmented into sections of pre-socialist houses, amidst which bigger apartment complexes have been built. Today, it is still expanding due to the new junction to the highway, which has made the area attractive to supermarket chains.
The complex of ten terraced houses occupies the old parking lots between the apartment blocks and one-story family houses. Two strings of houses stand in the intersection of the triangular lot. They create a peaceful inner space divided into gardens. Each house consists of four-and-a-half-bedroom apartments organized into three stories.
The ground floor is a big living space organized around the stairway and open to the garden, from which one can also access the inner walkway. The terraced houses occupy a small surface in the middle of the existing neighborhood, which, with careful organization, offer the same comforts as the freestanding houses in the neighborhood do, but on the other hand, provide more privacy to the residents. The houses use heat pumps to cool and heat. They have a solar device to heat water, and have been awarded the Energy Performance Certificate.