Articles by Luciana Pejić

The “youth hostel Gerlos” is located in the Austrian Alps in the village of Hochkrimml at an altitude of 1700 meters. Skiing is firmly anchored in Austrian society and is part of school teaching. This project aims to make school trips in an ecological environment more affordable. That is why the hotel was built from regional wood in solid wood construction, the hotel is heated by biomass district heating, electricity comes from photovoltaic, the journey is not made by individual transport but mainly by coach and the leftover wood from the transport of the cross-laminated timber walls was processed into furniture.

In a serene setting where the beach meets the pine trees, Marge Architects were commissioned to design a summer house for a family of four. The property is characterized by sand dunes and tall evergreens: a fragile environment where the roots of the trees act as natural protection against erosion.

Sauna hut is located in the beautiful garden of a family home in Hameln, near Hanover in Germany. It serves as the local retreat to enjoy a hot sauna session. Nestled within a giant beech hedge it hides from view and provides privacy to the users.

The house delicately integrates with the surrounding pine forest, blending into the existing spatial context while maintaining a maximum amount of greenery around itself and in between. The single-story structure in a wooded area creates a discrete and serene horizontal setting without any exaggerated attempt to establish itself – it is a natural part of the landscape.

At its heart, this inner-city home is about evolving what has become an all too typical recipe for infill housing. Where most infill houses follow the same stacked program and formal strategies (especially in Calgary), this project seeks to create a home within the established city that is specific to place by utilizing site-specific environmental constraints and natural forces, the building seeks to create a sustainable and durable home.

Three houses and a yard form the maintenance area of the Golf & Ski Resort in Ostravice. At the project’s beginning, many considerations were raised about the role of architecture and urbanism in the field of purely pragmatic purpose-built facilities. Today’s hectic world bound by economic criteria usually does not leave much space to design these buildings other than by following the most economical architectonic, urbanistic, and material solutions. Approaching the brief the other way round became both a clear philosophy and a challenge to our design.