schwerpunkt Converts Village Fire Station into Cultural Hub

Bratislava-based studio schwerpunkt has completed the Stará Hasička Cultural and Community Center, a 673 m² transformation of a former fire station in the historic center of a village. The project, photographed by Matej Hakár and dated 2026, grew out of an architectural competition launched in 2019.

The competition brief asked architects to convert the decommissioned fire station into a cultural and community hub for local residents. It also required the redesign of the adjacent public square. According to the architects' text, that square has long served as a venue for community and cultural events, including festivals, Christmas celebrations, concerts, and other public gatherings.

The dual scope of the brief shaped the project's logic. The building and the square were treated as a single civic ensemble rather than as two separate assignments. The former fire station, an institutional structure rooted in the everyday life of the village, becomes the anchor for a program of cultural use. The square, already the site of seasonal and public rituals, receives a formal redesign to support those functions.

The name of the completed project, Stará Hasička, translates as "old fire station," and the architects retained it as the identity of the new center. The designation signals the building's continuity with its past use rather than a clean break from it. A structure that once housed firefighting operations now hosts the gatherings, performances, and celebrations that previously unfolded on the square beside it.

The 2019 competition placed the project within a broader trend of adaptive reuse in Central European villages, where former civic and service buildings are converted into cultural infrastructure. The fire station typology, with its generous halls and direct relationship to the street and square, offers an adaptable framework for such conversions. The brief's requirement to redesign the adjacent public space alongside the building itself reflects the role that village squares continue to play as primary venues for collective life outside major urban centers.

The program targets local residents as its primary audience. The listed events on the square — festivals, Christmas celebrations, and concerts — indicate a seasonal and cyclical pattern of use that the redesigned space must accommodate. The building's 673 m² footprint positions it as a compact but significant cultural facility for a village context, where such institutions are rarely purpose-built and often emerge from the conversion of existing structures.

With the project dated 2026 and photography by Matej Hakár documenting the completed work, Stará Hasička now joins schwerpunkt's portfolio of public and community-oriented commissions. The seven-year trajectory from the 2019 competition launch to completion spans design development, and likely the construction timeline typical of publicly commissioned village projects.

As village centers across the region face pressure to maintain cultural life with limited resources, the Stará Hasička model — pairing an adaptively reused civic building with a redesigned event square — offers a template for how modest existing stock can carry new public programs.