The impulse for the creation of a typologically specific Children's Town project in Zlatovce near Trenčín was a large number of orphaned children and an insufficient network of orphanages that was lacking the desirable equipment. In cooperation with experts in psychology, pedagogy and sociology, architects P. Brtko and Ľ. Režucha developed a new way of care and housing for abandoned children in the form of artificial families.
The children's town consists of a pavilion complex of 36 buildings on a loose masterplan. In its centre, on an elevated terrace, there is a common facility consisting of a home management department, a health centre, a dining room with a kitchen, a gym with a swimming pool and a community hall. It also includes a standard-equipped 18-class elementary school with three types of laboratories, language classrooms and an audiovisual stair-stepped hall, which serves the residents of the town and children from Zlatovce.
The residential part of the town can be divided into five groups consisting of four two-story residential cells, which include single-story clubhouses. Four cells for children from three to six years old are designed for 20 children, the others for 21 children aged seven to eighteen years. Each cell is equipped with children's rooms, a two-room parents' apartment, a living room, a kitchen and a bathroom.
The consistent architectural expression of the area is determined by the material choice. The materiality that combines concrete, red ceramic tiles, wood and metal, is used also in the atypically designed interiors. The brutalist roughness of the used materials is softened by the presence of green terraces. These are complemented by exterior elements such as an amphitheatre, atriums or a characteristic dominant visible from distant views - an organically shaped statue of academic sculptor Karol Lacko.
Bibliography:
BRTKO, Peter – REŽUCHA, Ľudovít: Detské mestečko Zlatovce. Informačný katalóg ÚVPŠKS – 3, Ústav pre vývoj a projektovanie školských a kultúrnych stavieb, 1969.
Detské mestečko v Trenčíne. Projekt 12, 1970, 4, s. 154 – 159.
BYSTRICKÝ, D.: Detské mestečko Trenčín / Zlatovce. Projekt 16, 1974, 8, s. 8 – 15.
VÍTKOVÁ, Eva – KADOTOVÁ, Eva: Detské mestečko Trenčín - Zlatovce. Československý architekt 22, 1976, 6, s. 3.
ŠLACHTA, Štefan: Detské mestečko v Zlatovciach pri Trenčíne. ASB 14, 2007, 5, s. 90 – 91.
MIKLOŠ, Peter: S architektom Petrom Brtkom (Rozhovor). Projekt, 2012, 5/6, s. 90 – 97.
KOZOŇ, Antonín a kol.: Návrat pedagogiky do detských domovov. Trenčín, SpoSoIntE 2017, s. 236 –242.
