| competition: | 2020, 🥉 |
| design: | Veronika Lietavová, Ondra |
| David Zima, Matěj Zima | |
| collaboration: | a2architekti |
| investor: | veřejný |
| location: | Martin, SK |
A City Without a Block
The surroundings of the Roman Catholic Church of St. Martin became, like many other places, a stage for the clash between the historic city centre and the new visions of development and demands of transport in the 1980s. The result was typical: the historic urban fabric gave way to a new department store, a market, a four-lane road and a parking lot…
An undefined, fragmented context in which this part of Martin still finds itself today. The initiative to enter this unclear space and take part in the competition came from the “locals” — Nika and Maťo, who grew up in Martin — together with the local studio a2architekti.
The aim of the proposal was to give the places back to the people — the users who give a city meaning and transform lifeless masses and spaces into a living urban organism. The most important spatial gesture is to reinforce Martin’s “diameter” — a continuous public space running through the entire city centre, which we terminate with a park in front of the hospital entrance.
We “tidy away” the cars into one place, a parking house with an active public ground floor, while deliberately crossing the busy four-lane road at grade. The goal should be to gradually calm the traffic and give priority to pedestrians and cyclists, rather than simply avoiding cars.
In front of the hospital, we create a “public district” — a small-town forum with freestanding market structures and other public buildings, defining a flowing public space between them. A sequence of places with different characters and enough room to breathe. The most prominent position is reserved for SNP Square itself, which we see as a space capable of hosting events, while also functioning as a pleasant everyday place to cool off by the water feature or meet in the shade of the trees and the church.
The result should be a piece of the city that becomes a strong, natural part of Martin and can “take” further interventions that are beyond our control. We could try to create shopping streets, urban blocks, landmark buildings… But we all know that Martin is more of a village than a metropolis. And we believe that this peculiar, loose, weekend-like character of a Slovak small town is something worth cultivating.