Atelier Štěpán’s Silver House in Jihlava rehabilitates a protected burgher house on Masaryk Square, transforming it into a public cultural venue. The project reclarifies the Renaissance travee and reopens the deep urban plot from square to garden, while a calibrated silver palette threads new elements through the historic fabric. Structural and spatial upgrades focus on a renewed roof, a compact garden annex, and a central elevator, resulting in an accessible and legible sequence from the Gothic cellar to the contemporary attic.
Silver House Technical Information
- Architects1-5: Atelier Štěpán
- Location: Masarykovo náměstí 636/21, Jihlava, Czech Republic
- Gross Area: 1030 m2 | 11,087 Sq. Ft.
- Project Years: 2019 – 2024
- Photographs: © Filip Šlapal
The Silver House is like a historical sandwich. Every floor is from a different era. You begin with Gothic in the basement and end in the 21st century in the attic. You can experience all of this concentrated in a single elevator ride.
– Marek Jan Štěpán
Silver House Photographs
Typology Reframed: Recovering the Burgher-House Structure
The refurbishment reinstates the Renaissance travee, the modular bay rhythm that underpinned the house’s original organization. Accretions from later centuries are not erased; instead, the clarified bay structure frames them, allowing the universal plan to be legible again. This measured approach recovers the elasticity of the type. Rooms regain proportional coherence, circulation aligns with structural spans, and the interior reads as a sequence of robust, reconfigurable compartments rather than a collage of ad hoc partitions.
Urban presence remains anchored to Masaryk Square while the building’s formerly private depth becomes public. The ground floor reopens the passage from the front rooms to the rear courtyard, translating the traditional front–middle–back sequence into an accessible cultural corridor. The program sits within the travel logic: a tourist information center and teahouse animate the street, exhibition and gathering spaces occupy the middle rooms, and the plot’s depth culminates in a garden edge where the new annex mediates service, a winter garden, and access to upper floors.
Temporal Layering: A Didactic Vertical Sequence
The program is stacked to present a chronological reading of the house, from the Gothic cellar to the contemporary attic. The elevator and stairs act as interpretive devices. The centrally sited lift travels through an untreated, pigmented shaft that exposes masonry, infills, and construction episodes. Landings register changing structural logics floor by floor, turning a regulatory requirement into a sectional narrative. Daylight from above punctuates this ascent, tying the sequence together.
Surfaces are minimally treated. Walls and vaults are left in their raw state to retain material memory, while new components remain independent and, where possible, reversible. A freestanding glass bathroom occupies the center of a muraled room to protect historic paintings on perimeter walls. Mixed uses occupy the existing bays without distorting their cadence: a small concert hall, two painted salons, and offices share the plan. At the same time, tailored acoustic treatments and furnishings are confined to the bays they serve. The result is a layered occupation rather than a homogenized retrofit.
The Silver Thread: Material Legibility and Craft
A restrained gray field, punctuated by carefully calibrated silver accents, provides continuity between the old and the new. The choice is site-specific. Jihlava’s medieval prosperity was closely tied to silver mining, and archaeological research in the courtyard uncovered minting tools dating back to before 1300. The project mobilizes this history as a subtle material narrative: stainless and pearlescent finishes mark contemporary insertions, ceramic stoves receive silver-toned treatments, and a silver projection screen occupies the attic of the Center for Documentary Film.
Material contrasts make time legible without resorting to pastiche. Lime plasters, timber windows, and stone or terrazzo floors reassert traditional construction. New components are read as crisp, independent strata in stainless steel, with tin-coated details and pearlescent coatings. Graphics and wayfinding are hand-painted directly on walls, including a transposed veduta and corridor-scale drawings of plans and concept sketches. This adds an informational layer while avoiding fixtures that would clutter fragile surfaces.
Precise Interventions: Roof, Annex, and Accessibility
The roof is reengineered with a new truss that resolves lateral thrust and stabilizes the compromised attic floor. A narrow skylight slit runs just above the cornice, slightly lifting and visually detaching the roof from the historic masonry. The slit quietly references the classical frieze and cornice articulation while admitting even perimeter light into the top floor. Discreet roof windows sit flush with silver-toned standing seam cladding, maintaining the silhouette and minimizing visual noise from the square and garden.
A compact annex on the garden side consolidates services outside the historic envelope. Its blackened concrete volume, screened with stainless-steel mesh, houses the teahouse winter garden and a staircase that forms a bright hinge between old and new. This addition removes technical loads from the main structure and clarifies the original rooms, while the mesh veil modulates privacy and light without competing with the masonry fabric.
Accessibility is achieved by positioning the elevator at the center of the plan, after testing multiple locations. The shaft’s untreated, pigmented walls read as an architectural cross-section in motion, revealing constructive layers and earlier interventions as one ascends. Circulation improves without compromising historic partitions, and the lift aligns with the travee, preserving structural logic while ensuring barrier-free access to the full program, including the concert hall and attic screening space.
Silver House Plans
Silver House Image Gallery
About Atelier Štěpán
Atelier Štěpán is an architecture studio based in Brno, Czech Republic, founded in 1997 by Vanda and Marek Štěpán. The studio specializes in contemporary architecture rooted in conservative traditions, emphasizing the use of light as a material and the archetypal essence of architectural space. Known for its sacred buildings and civic architecture, Atelier Štěpán has received numerous accolades and continues to shape central European architectural discourse through projects that intertwine modern form with historical continuity.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Client: The City of Jihlava
- Construction company: Pozemní stavby Jihlava
- Painted graphics: Viktorie Štěpánová
- Painting of the music hall: Václav Kočí
- Restoration painting: Pavel Procházka
