Tereza Chroñáková

Sušírna is a vision of new social and cultural traditions for future generations in the Czech countryside triggered by current spatial developments in the rural areas.

My graduation project has a personal trajectory as it is focused on a place where I intend to work and live one day - a village called Libějovické Svobodné Hory in South Bohemia in the Czech Republic. What was once the core of life in the village - non-materialistic values, a community, traditions, openness and traditional rural architecture have been disappearing and nothing new that would support the social life in the village is coming. Especially the loss of collective places for occasional or daily meetings estranged the people from one another.

To base my design on the real-life situation, I walked around the village, door by door, with self-made physical research tools, to connect with my future neighbours and learn about the village’s spatial qualities and challenges. Based on the social experiment, I learnt that the accessible agricultural landscape with multiple public connections has been exchanged for enclosed private land where residents withdraw from public life. Sušírna opposes the privatisation trends in the village and aims to create a transitional space that is privately owned but accessible to community use. Sušírna is a fruit drying kiln that combines the community need for meeting space and our personal permaculture farm business demands. Following old traditions, the drying of fruit is a social event where people can meet, talk and produce wonderfully tasting dried fruit in the process. Everyone in the village has gardens with fruit trees, with large amounts of fruit that people are not able to process, and it goes to waste. The drying kiln would be open for community drying days when the villagers can bring their fruit to dry, and it will also serve as one of the enterprises in our farming business.

Sušírna is an ongoing project that will be realised in the village in 2022.

(Sušírna is a Czech word for drying kiln)