This Czech Fire Station Nods To Neighboring Barns

Ondřej Píhrt, copartner of Prague firm SOA Architekti, had never designed a fire station before. But he was familiar with the neighborhood in Psáry, just outside the city, where he was commissioned by the mayor to build one: He’d completed an elementary school there in 2019, and the new station would occupy a triangular plot between it and some homes. “Our aim was to create a place where machines and people coexist,” the architect reflects. Taking cues from neighboring barns, he conceived a 6,340-square-foot, steel-framed hall for Jirčany Fire Station with a gabled roof. But the skylights, all facades, and the three street-facing bays in which trucks go in and out are composed of translucent polycarbonate panels, which allow sunlight to permeate and passersby to see inside. Within the main garage, which houses firetrucks and serves as a fitness/relaxation hub for off-duty volunteers and has flooring of poured, polished concrete, is a smaller volume—“like a folding puzzle,” Píhrt notes—in prefabricated cross-laminated spruce panels, assembled on-site in about a week. It centers on a 10-foot-wide projection screen used for briefings for the firefighters, who can sit in Claudio Dondoli and Marco Pocci’s stackable Koi-Booki chairs, in a firehouse-red colorway, of course.