Just 168 kilometers long and 248 kilometers wide, Slovenia is a tiny country but is blessed with great geographical diversity. Two hours in a fast car on a highway through Slovenia can feel like driving in a video game. If you drive from west to east starting at the coast, you pass through the rocky Karst, then the green, forested heart of the country and up into the alpine mountains before descending through a hilly landscape and into the endless plains of Pannonia in the Carpathian Basin.
Move into the air. Flying in a helicopter over the country you’ll discover a smooth transition of different shades: of woodland greens, rocky greys, and the blue hues of the sea, lakes and rivers. And then there are the villages, settlements, towns and cities. Various local natural characteristics are grafted onto the roofscapes of each particular region: a consequence of changing climatic conditions and the available resources for construction.
Sadar + Vuga was founded by Jurij Sadar and Boštjan Vuga in Ljubljana in 1996, focusing on open, innovative and integral architectural design and urban planning. Projects include the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Slovenia, which received the Bauwelt Prize (2001); the new entrance hall for the National Gallery of Slovenia; the Mercator Shopping center; and the housing projects Condominium Trnovski Pristan and House Gradaška, which were both recipients of prizes and nominations for the Mies van der Rohe Awards. Recent projects have included the Sports Park Stožice in Ljubljana, a new air traffic control centre at Ljubljana airport, and the Cultural Center of EU Space Technologies in Vitanje, Slovenia.
So the pitches of roofs, their materials and colours, change as fast as the natural geography. You pass over the almost flat red brick roofs of the coastal region, loop over steep wooden shingled dwellings in the Alps and the thick thatches of the plains. Each region is identifiable by its roof colour alone. These traditions of building construction smoothly translate into contemporary architectural production. The ancestry of the roofs perched above many new buildings in Slovenia is easy to trace, as they share similar materials and pitches with traditional ones – inhaling the climatic parameters of their particular region, yet more relaxed in shape and volume.
Thus new roofs extend to the ground, rise up in zigzags or become huge inclined surfaces. Sometimes it’s difficult to distinguish where a building stops and the natural landscape begins. Even modernist residential towers in Slovenia have rooftops that reflect where they belong: sheltering triplex apartments echo the mountains beyond.
The two roofs of our own Stožice complex, for example, a stadium and sports hall in Ljubljana, are clad in aluminium shingles whose colour shifts between silver and gold, depending on the weather or time of day. This means that even at their vast scale, the sports complex roofs almost merge into the natural context and contours when viewed from a distance.
Go to Google Earth. Check out Slovenia. On your interactive screen, you can hardly distinguish human construction from preserved nature. The roofs are landscapes, the landscapes are roofed.
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