PROARH, The Stone House, 2014. Courtesy: PROARH.

Time, space, and existence are intertwined and interdependent. They act and interact in tangible or intangible ways forming an imprint of our presence.
We are presenting the flow of certain elements – materials, typologies, shapes – and how they correspond to specific contexts and times, creating the spaces of existence.
What are the crucial changes made by time? Is the progress of time irrelevant? Is everything site specific? Is architecture ever-changing or are the users? We will try to indirectly answer these questions through three of our projects by focusing on housing as a basic, primordial aspect of architecture.
These designs were processed through the t-s-e prism, taking into consideration the genius loci, the overall architectural heritage, people’s habits and their way of life, past and future tenants, and past and future technologies. We coped to understand the habitat and its habitants and their ambiguous relations and dependencies thusmastering the matter and reducing the arbitrary.
The three houses shown here are made for today / 3houses4now; they reveal who and what the users are today / us now; they hope to make a true imprint of what is house now.
Hiza
Hiza is a contemporary interpretation of a traditional rural cottage of the Zagorje Region. It is a renovation of a preexisting house that took into consideration the characteristics of local architectural heritage and design. The form of the house was kept, while the porch was substituted with a glass cube. The unobtrusive design reinterpreted the traditional hay-thatched house of a rudimentary layout. The thatching – a distinct element of the local heritage – on the roof was replaced with a new one and extended over the facade (technical innovation).
Stone House
Stone House is situated only a few meters from the Adriatic Sea on a cramped site in a densely built grid of holiday houses and within an area with a strict building code. The house was designed to occupy all of the permitted area and to offset the boundaries of the site while using a centuries old spatial concept. It is a compact, closed polyhedron, a solid volume clad on all sides using the same stone – the authentic material and an excellent medium for dealing with climate factors.
Issa Grotto Hill House
Issa Grotto Hill House is a temporary dwelling located on an isolated site on the island of Vis. Since the steep hill slope makes the plot unusable, the reinterpreted system of authentic stone dry-walls has been applied to create functional zones and a new rural man-made topography. Living spaces are designed as an artificial grotto, a carved-in memory of a shelter, of a primitive bivouac. The complete absence of any infrastructure and the location’s general inaccessibility impose that sustainability and self-dependence are the primary drivers of this design.