At the suburban edge of Murska Sobota, Skupaj Arhitekti reads the Pannonian plain as a tectonic argument — three concrete cores, a free plan, and a panorama window that fully retracts to dissolve the line between interior and open landscape.
Murska Sobota sits at the easternmost edge of Slovenia, where the land stops being hilly and becomes something else: flat, expansive, agricultural in a way that feels absolute. The Pannonian plain stretches from here toward Hungary and beyond, and the suburban territory at its margin carries the usual ambiguities of transitional space — neither city nor countryside, structured without coherence, open without intention. This is the site the architects chose to read carefully before they built anything.
Designed by Tomaž Ebenšpanger of Skupaj Arhitekti, the house is conceived not as an object placed upon this landscape but as a low, horizontally articulated field that follows its logic. The reference point is explicit: the functionalist modernist tradition of the region, particularly the work of Feri Novak, whose buildings in northeast Slovenia developed a tectonic clarity that treated structure, program, and material expression as a single problem. That inheritance is taken seriously here.
Three reinforced-concrete cores carry a flat slab, liberating the plan into an open, flexible living space oriented toward two contrasting gardens. The structural decision produces a spatial consequence: without internal load-bearing walls, the living areas are free to extend, contract, and reconfigure — and at one corner, a fully retractable panorama window dissolves the building's edge entirely, opening the interior to the horizontal expanse of the plain. A glazed, load-free corner amplifies this reading. The house is not just oriented toward the landscape; it is, at its most open, continuous with it.
The concrete is mixed with locally sourced aggregate from the Mura River — a material decision that is also a contextual one, grounding the building in the geology of its specific place. The walls carry the colour and texture of the riverbed, and the result is a surface that reads simultaneously as construction material and as compressed terrain. The architects describe the building as "constituted from" its site rather than placed upon it. The photographs by Ana Skobe make clear how seriously that claim holds: in certain light, the house reads as an extension of the earth.
