The House of Good Intentions

architects Ivana Ergić& Vesna Milutin - Capsula, Vanja Ilić
project Residental POS (Social Housing Programme) Building, Cres, Croatia
written by Maroje Mrduljaš

 

Collective housing in small urban communities, regardless of its morphology, is always an issue sensitive in latent disproportion to both sociological and built context. A collective housing building in a big city is, as a rule, a basic element of the urban tissue and generally is a part of a greater town-planning operation or at least a part of the planner’s intention. In a small town, it is an exception, all the more so, if its scale or its urban position ignores the given situation. If we focus on historical towns on the Adriatic coast, we will notice they developed spontaneously and organically, with a typical condensed concentration of small-scale buildings, where it is less common to find collective dwelling within one building, collective dwelling being present rather in the whole urban structure due to the logic of interrelation of life styles and urban forms. Such urban nuclei can almost be interpreted as big and especially complex collective housing buildings.