SLLA ARCHITECTS

Community centre Máj

«To create the right conditions for the use of public space is an indispensable part of the rehabilitation of existing residential quarters, in which most of the city population lives.»

The Community centre Máj is located in the biggest 1980s mass-housing settlement in České Budějovice, an ethnically and socially mixed neighborhood. With an increased concentration of the Roma population, the district has been the site of tension and several riots.

The new community centre building is part of the regeneration of the whole settlement; the new social infrastructure forms part of a future local downtown with the Market Square as a main public space. The centre is designed for social care services aimed at children, youth, and mothers, including a primary prevention centre and senior centre, as well as social counseling and a municipal police station.

The aim of the centre is to improve the quality of community life; the project naturally focuses on the building envelope, on the interface which is in direct contact with public space. The compact volume of the building, with a playground on the roof and climbing greenery on the facades, with semi-public connecting spaces alongside the public space of the new square, is meant to serve as a social meeting point for children or teenagers and as a social information centre for the settlement inhabitants. Programmed space of different institutions, with entries from different sides and levels is distributed among five floors above ground. Stairs and other communication and sojourn areas on all levels of the building periphery allow the interconnection of different parts of the building, of the community centre with the public space, as well as direct external connection of the public square to all levels of the building and to the roof (with the playground).

As this building stands in a colorful environment, because of the multi-colored facades of the adjacent prefab panel buildings, its expressiveness is only formed by the activities on the border between interior and exterior, and by its greening, which is supposed to become its most dominant material within a few years, and should define the community centre’s microclimate.