Kosmalt by Atrium Architekti reworks a thirteen-story 1960s workers’ dormitory in the Terasa housing estate of Kosice, Slovakia, into a dense residential building with 507 compact apartments. Rather than suppressing the original panel structure, the renovation uses its prefabricated grid, generous communal interiors, and durable material fabric as the basis for a contemporary housing strategy.
Kosmalt Technical Information
- ArchitectsAtrium Architekti
- LocationKysucka 16, Kosice, Slovakia
- Gross Area15,625 m2 | 168,186 Sq. Ft.
- Renovation Years2021 – 2025
- Original Building1960’s
- Photographs© Matej Hakar
We did not want to erase the building’s original logic. The task was to make its repetition, material traces, and communal spaces readable again, while giving the apartments a standard of living suited to the present.
– Atrium Architekti
Reframing the Panelak as an Architectural Resource
Kosmalt occupies a difficult position within the architectural culture of postwar housing. Built in the 1960s as a workers’ dormitory for the local steel industry, the building belongs to a typology often treated as technically useful but architecturally exhausted. Atrium Architekti approaches it differently, reading the slab not as obsolete stock but as an urban framework with structural clarity, depth, and latent spatial capacity.
The renovation preserves the residential use, yet the social model changes substantially. The former dormitory, conceived for collective industrial accommodation and institutional oversight, is reorganized into compact private units for contemporary urban living. This shift is not only functional. It alters the relationship between occupant and building, moving from standardized provision toward a more individual reading of domestic space within a repeated structural order.
The project is strongest where it resists the temptation to disguise the slab. The scale, repetition, and infrastructural efficiency of the original structure become architectural material in their own right. Instead of applying a new image over the existing frame, the renovation works through the logic already embedded in the building: modular rooms, double-loaded corridors, symmetrical stair cores, extensive glazing, and the persistent rhythm of balconies across the long elevations.
Facade Grid, Urban Presence, and Modular Order
The thirteen-story volume is defined by a rigorous 22-by-13 grid of prefabricated concrete facade modules. Each field corresponds to the cellular logic of the plan, producing an elevation in which repetition is not merely visual but organizational. The renovation reinforces this order by treating the grid as the primary compositional device, allowing the building’s mass to read with unusual directness in the landscape of the Terasa housing estate.
The monochrome grey surface reduces the facade to proportion, shadow, and depth. This restraint helps clarify the relationship between the concrete frame, the recessed loggias, and the thin balcony railings. On the long elevations, the accumulation of identical cells produces an almost abstract facade, while the blank gable ends retain the tectonic weight of the slab. At ground level, the refurbished travertine plinth introduces a warmer and more tactile datum, anchoring the otherwise severe volume to the pedestrian scale.
The new entrances revise the building’s threshold without competing with the slab above. Board-formed concrete canopies, bush-hammered columns, glazed vestibule walls, and corrugated metal pavilions establish a legible transition from the open housing estate grounds to the interior communal areas. Their lower scale is important: the additions serve as mediating elements between lawns, mature trees, paved approaches, and the vertical authority of the residential block.
Material Memory and Contemporary Interventions
A significant part of the renovation involves recovering materials obscured by successive alterations. Cast terrazzo floors in corridors and staircases, marble cladding in the vestibule, the travertine exterior plinth, exposed steel beams, and the original steel gallery and stair are retained and repaired. These elements are not presented as relics. They remain within daily use, where wear, maintenance, and occupation continue to define their value.
The new material layer is deliberately legible. Expanded metal ceilings run through the corridors, corrugated sheet metal lines parts of the vestibule and entrance volumes, and custom lighting is integrated into the metal systems. Strong color is used with precision rather than as surface decoration: salmon, ivory, and yellow mark spatial territories, circulation routes, and shared elements. The palette gives identity to repeated spaces while maintaining a clear distinction between inherited fabric and recent intervention.
This distinction prevents the project from slipping into nostalgic reconstruction. The old concrete, terrazzo, steel, and stone are allowed to remain visibly of their time, while the added metalwork and graphic systems introduce a more contemporary industrial register. The dialogue is sometimes direct, even blunt, but it suits the building’s utilitarian origins. The renovation gains architectural coherence by accepting roughness, repetition, and exposed construction as part of the building’s character.
Compact Living and Shared Interior Infrastructure
The original residential cells are transformed into 21 m2 apartments organized as narrow, efficient rectangles. Bathrooms, kitchenettes, wardrobes, appliances, and storage are consolidated near the entrance, leaving the glazed end of each unit for sleeping, working, and access to the loggia. The plan is extremely compressed, but full-height glazing, exterior space, curtains, and distant views across Kosice help extend the room’s perceived depth.
The limits of the compact units place greater architectural responsibility on the shared interior infrastructure. Corridors, staircases, and the double-height vestibule are treated as substantial communal spaces rather than residual circulation. Polished terrazzo floors, exposed concrete walls, colored expanded-metal soffits, and full-height glazing at the ends of corridors give these areas a spatial dignity often absent from dense residential conversions. The vestibule, with its exposed steel gallery, stairs, and colored structural elements, serves as the building’s principal collective room.
The symmetrical plan could easily become disorienting, particularly with hundreds of similar apartments distributed across repeated floors. The wayfinding system counters this through color, oversized numerals, and/or minus signs that identify corridor wings. Painted directly onto raw or refurbished concrete, the graphics have a coarse and almost provisional quality, contrasting with the precision of the metal ceilings and fixtures. Navigation becomes part of the building’s architectural reading, linking plan, color, memory, and daily movement.
Plans
About Atrium Architekti
Atrium Architekti is an architecture studio based in Kosice, Slovakia, established in 1991 to integrate architecture, urban planning, design, and fine art into a single practice. Its work focuses on the human relationship to surroundings, nature, and the self, pursuing formal and layout purity, simplicity of solution, organic connection to the exterior, natural materials, and a path toward energy self-sufficiency.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Authors: Michal Burak, Dusan Burak, Jana Varchola Burakova
- Design team: Tomas Eisner, Co-author and Graphic design; Matus Gomolca
- Structural engineers: Erik Duhan; Michal Varga
- MEP consultants: Stefan Petkanic, Building services; Erik Spak, Electrical installation
- Construction company: Chemkostav, General contractor
- Matej Hakar: Photographer
- Graphics realization: Sedem
- Concrete paintings: Natreto
- Expanded metal: Fural
- Mailboxes: Marbox
- Original architects: Ladislav Grec and Robert Kandrik
- Research references or publications: Photos of the original pre-renovation state, the architect’s archive
