IN THE ATTIC
authors : Piotr Banaszek / Dorota Jaśkiewicz / Mikołaj Wierszyłłowski
2006
photo : Maciej Frydrysiak / Norbert Banaszyk
The attic is a bit ready-made space… but how to avoid its rustic character?
How to cleverly manage the space so that there are no random divisions, slants, spatial impurities resulting from the complicated construction of the roof truss?
How to deal with a difficult V-shaped layout with an entrance at its beginning and not create long corridors when shaping functions?
We had to face these questions when designing this interior. However, architectural decisions became priorities. Originally, the interior had only one window in a truncated corner, an exposed roof truss and an asymmetrical slant –the sharp one towards the street and the small one towards the yard. The decision to break through additional windows became crucial to be able to design any residential function there. We also organized the space from the inside by insulating the roof and hiding less aesthetic elements of its design. However, we wanted to preserve the characteristic elements: the rhythm of wooden pillars with braces or a fragment of a brick wall. The idea for the space was to design "cubes" separating individual zones in the apartment. We gave the walls a curved, slightly aerodynamic form, thus breaking with the convention of dusty, rustic "coziness". At the entrance, we located a "cube” with kitchen furnishing and along the wall from the corridor "a cube” containing a toilet and a bathroom". This was enough to organize the dining room, living area and bedroom, as if they entwined these cubes. Bearing in mind how big an advantage is an open space, the walls separating them were led only to the height of the horizontal beams of the roof structure. Above – where it was unavoidable – glazing appeared. This way we avoided classic designing by rooms and create clear friendly modern interior.
TRUSS IN THE FOREGROUND