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Today, let's take a look at the Iconik Apartments in Prague.
Completed in 2023 and designed by edit!, this mid-rise project is split into two distinct volumes -- a 9-story one and an 8-story one. This was done to respond to both the surrounding context and the way that the parcels were divided on the site prior to redevelopment. In total, the building is 5,433 m2 and has 48 apartments.
There are 3 levels of below-grade parking, which are accessed via a single parking elevator (pictured above). Based on the one example parking plan provided (which has 13 spaces), I'm guessing the project has somewhere around ~39 total parking spaces (13 x 3). This is a higher parking ratio (39/48 = 0.81) than I would have expected for what looks to be a central and urban location.
The color of the traffic coating in the garage is nice, though.
The lobby is simple. It contains one elevator and one staircase running up the building. I like how prominent and accessible they made the latter. It encourages you to take the stairs if you live on one of the lower floors.
Above is what one of these lower floors might look like. There are two dual-aspect apartments on either end of the plate, meaning they have windows facing both the street and the rear courtyard. There are also a handful of studio apartments facing this same courtyard.
Finally, above is what the outdoor spaces look like for the penthouses at the top. The clear heights appear a little low, but presumably they were working to an overall building height.
I like studying this scale of project because it is a housing type that we should be building more of in our cities. So it is helpful to see how others are doing it. In the case, there are a number of obvious takeaways: no onerous loading/servicing requirements on the ground floor, a single parking elevator in lieu of a space-consumptive ramp (though less parking would would be even more ideal), and a single means of egress throughout the building.
If you're looking to build at this scale, these are good places to start.
Drawings/Photos: edit! and BoysPlayNice
This is the chalet that our group has been staying in for the last week:
We've been calling it a tree house. It is 5 levels in total. And you circulate through the house using a spiral staircase in the center of it. It's space efficient, but there are a lot of stairs.
The site is downhill from the road, which, as we have talked about before, creates a more challenging build than uphill from the road.
You enter the chalet on the third level, which itself houses 2 bedrooms. One floor below and one floor above also have 2 bedrooms, meaning there are 6 bedrooms in total. On the lowest floor is an indoor hot tub, a shared parking garage, and a shared ski/snowboard room.
Every mountain house needs, at a minimum, two things: a fireplace and a hot tub. Ideally the latter is outside.
As is typical in the mountains, the main living space is on the top floor (level 5 in this case). You want this for the views. If you're building into a sloping site, the lowest floors are usually somewhat constrained.
We did the same thing with Parkview Mountain House. But it does mean that you circulate through the more "private" spaces within the house before reaching the more "public" ones. This is the opposite of what happens in most homes.
The underground parking garage is accessed by way of a small parking elevator that lowers you down two floors. Initially this seemed excessive, but it is a shared elevator/garage. The chalet is semi-detached chalet, if you will, and so this was probably the only way they could get enough parking on the site. Assuming our attached neighbor is of a similar size, that's 12 bedrooms.
It also creates an important pathway so that people don't need to bring their skis and snowboards through the house.
Every site has its challenges and that is especially the case in the mountains.
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