A house on a cliff

name: A house on a cliff
designer: Miljan Drljevic – ADVACON
author site: Miljan Drljevic – ADVACON

Тhe client’s desire to move from the crowds of Vracar historical and the city bustle to a space connected to the natural environment – free from stress, but with a good connection with the city. The selected plot on the cliff above the Danube in Novi Banovci offers a beautiful view of the river and the Banat plains. The house can be reached in about 15 minutes by highway from New Belgrade. The project task itself was not too detailed. The basic requirement was to get large open and connected living spaces with as few partitions as possible, as well as the house not to be too big in its external dimensions, to be functionally dimensioned for two main occupants and their guests and to be modern and unobtrusive. During the entire design process, we worked closely with the investor and through mutual cooperation and exchange of ideas, the design evolved from the initial sketches to the final solution based on which the building was constructed. We had the complete trust of the investors and the final solution was reached relatively quickly and the conceptual solution did not deviate too much from the finished product. The specificity of this house is that it was conceived first of all keeping in mind the environment and the terrain on which it was placed. Its interior with double heights and open glazed corners allows a direct connection with the outside space, and when the glass surfaces are open, they erase the rigid boundary between outside and inside. The main design idea was to obtain the cleanest possible modern forms with emphasized horizontal lines that would visually connect the building itself with the terraces and the garage. This is achieved by a white strip of constant width that descends from the roof to the ground in a continuous flow and connects two completely independent cubes. The structural system is a reinforced concrete skeleton with wall panels with two central columns and accentuated cantilever overhangs. The accented corners of the building are made without pillars in the corner to allow the building to open to the viewer. Reinforced concrete beams on the roof slab were placed as counter beams upwards in order to visually achieve the same thickness on the terraces and roof, and thermal insulation layers were also packed in that space. The roof is waterproofed with the highest quality roof EPDM membranes produced by Firestone. The facade is dominated by natural brick slats, and the white accents are done as a classic contact facade with a finishing coating – fine-grained silicate facade plaster. The biggest challenge in the project, and in the execution itself, were the large cantilever overhangs of the eaves over the open glass corners, which are entirely supported by a reinforced concrete canvas. During concreting, all cantilever overhangs were slightly raised so that they would have a projected appearance after removing the formwork. The execution of hanging the corner facade in the living room was also complex, for which, during the pouring of the roof beams, it was necessary to leave a tube for threading the rope with millimeter precision, in order to subsequently lower the rope and position it so that it is immediately hidden by the profile of the facade wall of the curtain in the upper. zone. In addition to the above, the laying of the layers of the flat roof was also carefully planned; due to the counter beams in the roof slab, there was a very limited space to perform the necessary technical inclinations of the roof planes and the formed longitudinal gutters so that they would not exceed the defined height of the roof cornice of continuous height as an integral part of the concept design.