svet vmes architecture studio was commissioned to design the project for a daycare center to house 350 children and their caregivers in what was an old abandoned land in the Slovenian city of Kočevje. The city sought to build a daycare that followed the ideals of sustainable development and met the passive house standard.

The new building provides the city with a new learning environment that emphasizes children's freedom of choice, the right to privacy, the possibility of learning by observing and the development of spatial sensitivity. Therefore, the condensation of an urban program that was previously dispersed in inadequate buildings, with the project, is blurred.
Kočevje Kindergarten designed by the svet vmes architecture studio has a program that houses the kindergarten to the north and the playground to the south. The building is built around atriums that allow light to reach the ground floor where The classes for the youngest children are located, leaving the classrooms for the older children on the first floor.

The building is constructed almost entirely of wood and wood-based building materials. The structure is mainly made of cross-laminated wood exposed to the interior, insulated with wood fiber. The dating generates irregularly shaped corners that soften the morphology of the building, thus becoming a setting for the daily life of the children, their parents, their teachers, their cooks and cleaners.


Kočevje Kindergarten by svet vmes. Photograph by Ana Skobe.
 

Description of project by svet vmes

The kindergarten built in Kočevje on brownfield land regenerates part of town by condensing programme previously dispersed in unfit buildings. It provides a new learning environment that emphasizes the children’s freedom of choice by creating various nooks, the right to privacy with spaces of seclusion, the possibility of learning by observing, development of spatial sensitivity through diverse spatial experiences including sincere use of building materials with tactile surfaces for 350 children and their caretakers.
 
The kindergarten envelope closes towards the urban northern side of the plot, creating one appearance, and opens to the southern playground exposing the warm timber interior of the playrooms creating a dialogue with its context. The building itself organizes units around two atria - "puddle" and "hill" - that allow for light to reach the deep ground floorplan and add to the spatial experiences, with younger children staying on the ground floor with a direct connection to the exterior playground while the older children's home rooms inhabit the first floor with direct access to the roof playground. This way the footprint of the building is minimized while creating enough exterior playground area and direct access for all playrooms.


Kočevje Kindergarten by svet vmes. Photograph by Ana Skobe.
 
The irregularly shaped façade nooks, soften the building and place children as actors in the living façade –everybody wants to play in windows. The building lives through the users and becomes a stage for the everyday life of children, their parents, their teachers, their cooks, and cleaners. The interior of the building shows off its wooden structure as much as possible, to give the interior a contrasting warmth. The interior thick playroom walls allow for storing of daybeds, toys, creations and form playful, upholstered nooks that allow children to peek into the outside world and observe their friends arriving in the morning or their grandparents in the afternoon to pick them up. The main stairs are doubled by a tunnel that only kids can use, to try and beat their parents to the top where a slide that disappears into the floor awaits.
 
From its inception the municipality strived for a kindergarten, that would embody the ideals of sustainable development. The building is almost entirely constructed of wood and wood-based construction materials. The structure is mainly cross-laminated timber exposed to the interior, insulated with wood fibre, and protected by a wooden ventilated façade finished of with thermally treated spruce. The building achieves the "Passiv Haus" standard, also by utilizing district heating powered by wood biomass burning.

More information

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Architects
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svet vmes. Jure Hrovat, Ana Kreč, Katja Paternoster.
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Collaborators
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Landscape architects.- Kolektiv Tektonika. Darja Matjašec, Nejc Florjanc, Katja Mali.
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Area
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Gross Built Area.- 5,025 sqm.
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Dates
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Completion Year.- 2023.
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Location
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Kočevje, Slovenia.
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Photography
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Exterior.- Ana Skobe.
Interior.- Matevž Paternoster, Žiga Lovšin.
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SVET VMES is an architecture studio founded by architects Jure Hrovat and Ana Kreč in 2010 as a non-formal collective of architects in Ljubljana, Slovenia, with the need to question, explore and expose the potential of "in-between" space within buildings. public and especially educational. By alternating between observation and action, SVET VMES analyzes existing deteriorated interior and exterior intermediate areas, to locate painful points and remediate, heal and transform them into places of events, potential, comfort, interaction, negotiation and delight. and seclusion, inventing a new kind of “charged” interstitial typology. Multi-scale interventions allow them to instigate and explore new “in-between” behaviors, foster spatial sensitivity and emergence among people while challenging their daily patterns and existing social reality.

In recent years, SVET VMES has continually modified and transformed into a research design practice, whose work is recognized, published and awarded locally and internationally. The practice is led by two founding partners, architects Jure Hrovat and Ana Kreč, who are currently PhD candidates at KU Leuven, Department of Architecture, Campus Sint Lucas Brussels in Belgium, while assisting the design studio of prof. Jurij Sadar at the University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Architecture. In 2019, SVET VMES was nominated for the Plečnik Medal for its contribution to the enrichment of architectural culture for its architectural research project in middle school spaces through the construction of case studies.

They have been guest lecturers or critics at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, Tsinghua University, Beijing, Hunan University, China, KU Leuven, Sint Lucas School of Architecture, Ghent, Belgium, University of Westminster in London, United Kingdom Kingdom, NTNU, Trondheim School of Architecture and Fine Arts, Norway, BAU Design College of Barcelona, TU Wien, IUAV of Venice, Italy and TU Berlin.
 
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