The question of the context at the beginning of the design process is actually the question of material that generates “style” if we do not approach the task with ready-made solutions and forms.

The Banjavčićeva / Tuškanova / Vrbanićeva / Heinzelova Streets block is located within a zone under transformation from the intensively industrial (plants and warehouses) into a residential and business zone. The existing corner house Banjavčićeva 1 – Tuškanova 43 was built as a C.D. Gaon knitwear factory by Pollak and Bornstein, civil engineers and architects, by the end of the thirties of the 20th century. It suffered a series of reconstructions, including the extended wing in Banjavčićeva Street.

Even the shortest description of the existing structures, whose purpose required high construction quality that enables reconstruction, extension, and addition, tells us what our “object” should be: the structure as such or the building as it was.

The project respected the principle, irrespective of the new program, that no period has the right to annihilate creative achievements of a past one, especially not from the position of assessing current aesthetic views. Therefore we have torn down the added third floor of the original building in Tuškanova Street, set the addition from the 3rd to the 6th floor in new ground-floor plan relations (in the form of the letter L) and translated it towards the yard.

The original building’s initial proportion of openings were restored, with necessary enlargements adjusted to the new program. In this way, the basic form of the structure was re-established, despite its considerable growth through the addition.

The addition is planned in steel, so that it, like the existing structures with their skeletal frame construction, offers a planning chance to a series of possibilities (spatial and substantial transformations).