Umbrella shop

The interior workshop course includes individual practical work done by students on an interior design project. The topic is spaces for different purposes within existing buildings in the centre and central area of Zagreb. Locations significant to the formation of visual experience for pedestrians in the city centre are selected. These include spaces located in buildings of significant architectural features, often registered in the register of protected cultural monuments and those places that are in contact with public spaces. The topics change every academic year. Students choose an area among several offered and, in consultation with their principal, propose or accept contents considered as matching the character of the site. After researching the context and the formal characteristics of the building and an analysis programme, the interior project is drafted to scale. Formal intervention along peripheral pedestrian streets and squares connected with facades and shops are also possible.
The aim of the task is for students, whilst designing an interior and including various scales ( from 1:500 to 1:5), to attempt to take into consideration that the advantage of architecture does not consist in the fact that it banally obscures or protects an empty space, but in the fact that it constructs an inner world in which the parameters of time, light, space, material are set according to certain laws of logic ... (Henri Focillon : The Life of Forms).
The focus of the creative efforts of students is channelled towards the statement that a building should always be much more about the interior experience than the exterior - like a book ... (Steven Holl)

In the academic year 2012/13 the following locations were offered: the ground level of the passage at the Matica Hrvatskih Obrtnika building by architects A. Freudenreich and Z. Požgaj (1937) at Ilica 49 and Miškec’s Passage and Kino Europa and adjoining shops by builders S. Florschütz (1924), between 3 Varšavska Street – 10 Masarykova Street.