RevitaLine

2021

Our firm entered the Container City international architectural competition by UNI.

Thank you for your vote and support!

We live in a brutal world. We possess, consume, exhaust, destroy, throw away, pollute, rot everything, nature, our own built environment, body and soul. Masses of self-centred people billow in the world, people for whom nothing counts but themselves. Not only do these people take no notice of the others around them, but they do not even realise when they become self-destructive. They do not see, only look. They do not hear, only roar. They do not build, only spoil.

It should come to an end. Stop it!

Let us give new life to the destroyed spaces, so that the places turn into spaces again. Spaces where it will be worth living. Spaces, where human identity gets stronger, where it will again have a significance that we exist. Where new life springs, flowers grow, and you can hear laughter, where people look in the eye and see one another, and where it is worth living and working. Let us take possession of the spaces, which have been spoilt in the past decades. It is we who destroyed them. Let us start cultivating them, remove the rust, the trash, the poisons and step by step begin taking care of them. Carefully protecting, affectionately. This process will be a projection of a kind of self-purification. It starts from inside, manifests itself in our environment and eventually will affect us. A healing process. We can heal the wounds that we ourselves have made in the landscape. These wounds can occur anywhere. For example, in cities, industrial environments, in formerly liveable areas that we shaped to our own image, because we wanted to gain profits from them. But there is nothing left for us any more but one useful step: we can heal and recover. We cannot but take this step.

The place for this plan could be anywhere, but in this particular case it is an industrial harbour of a big city. We all know that in the past centuries we have only used these areas to get proceeds from transportation, from feeding the all-devouring industry. This was a cruel job, poisonous and merciless. At a number of places – as a result of the technological development – such activities have already ceased. But the places have been left behind, robbed, dirty, neglected wounds. What have moved in here ever since is degradation, depravity, and vice. These areas do not live, they are dead.

We wanted to demonstrate how these wounds could or must be healed with simple elements and steps. There will be much cleaning job. We should create a very simple, unpretentious, and extremely functional unit that can be multiplied, in accordance with the space at our disposal. In so far as the healing, cleaning process begins, there will be an automatic need for repeating the basic unit. The lifeline starts growing and after some time it will run through the formerly destroyed landscape as a clear current, like a stream in the desert. It gives life-saving water. An oasis.

Our basic unit is made of 15 containers. Not fewer, not more. You do not have to go a long way for them, they are there, they are part of the wound. They are items that can be joined to one another on the basis of simple logic: if horizontally placed they are dwelling units, if vertically they serve as connecting units, staircases. One container – one dwelling unit, which also has an open platform of its own. The staircases lead up to the upper level, where there are independent dwelling units, too, with their own open platforms, separated from one another. One container, one unit thus has a twofold function: you can live in it, and it also functions as the open platform for the upper unit. These are simple, unassuming accommodations. No luxury. For one, two or three persons. They can be modified according to need and season. They have a social character, having common sanitary facilities. Every module of 15 containers is supplied with one sanitary and 9 dwelling units.

Low building. Because there is no need for towers, superfluous stacking of levels one on top of the other. Because we know that the extent of the covered area is not identical with the extent of the use of the area, that is the footprint of our lives does not depend on how large the outlay of our home is. There is no need for much energy to operate a two-storey building. It is the way of living in the building and its surroundings that determines how much burden we put on the environment. This two-storey basic unit, moreover its longer variant with several basic units joined together, have a small footprint. It blends in the landscape; it takes from it just as much as it is enough to function. The basic units can be repeated, almost endlessly.

It can be built easily, quickly, using recycled materials (containers, doors and windows, coating). It can sufficiently be insulated. The roof, being planted with greenery provides a pleasant microclimate. The immediate surroundings can be planted with all kinds of vegetation, thus rendering it lively. You can build it by units, and the process can be continued at will. As long as it is important to breathe new life into squalid industrial harbours, regions. After some time, the vegetation may become prevalent, the units can be changed and rendered more comfortable.

This is how RevitaLine is created.