A Village, Not an Image
The Dalmatian village was never designed as an image. It emerged from necessity: from the slope of the ground, the direction of the wind, the scarcity of shade, the limits of construction and the need to live close to others. Houses were compact. Walls were thick. Streets were narrow. Buildings, gardens and working spaces grew around one another over time, producing a dense structure in which the spaces between houses mattered as much as the houses themselves.
Today, much of the Adriatic coast is being built according to almost the opposite logic.
The landscape is divided into plots, each containing its own house, terrace, pool, parking and view. Architecture becomes an isolated object and the space between buildings is reduced to the distance required between properties. The result may offer privacy, but it rarely produces a place.
Settlement
KAAMEN starts from a simple question: can a contemporary tourist development recover some of the spatial intelligence of a village without pretending to be one?
This has little to do with reproducing vernacular forms. Stone, shutters or pitched roofs are not what makes a settlement work. More interesting are the relationships behind them: density and openness, exposure and protection, repetition and difference, the individual dwelling and the shared ground.
The project therefore treats the village less as an image than as an organisational principle.
Grid
The houses are deliberately almost identical and organised by a clear five-metre structural grid.
Difference comes mainly from position. One house meets a wall differently, another opens toward a garden, frames another part of the landscape or stands at a different point along a passage. Small rotations disturb the grid without dissolving it. The system remains legible, while the experience of moving through it changes.
This limited vocabulary is intentional. Traditional settlements often produce considerable spatial richness from very few elements: houses, stone walls, gardens, passages and pieces of open ground, repeated and adjusted according to circumstance.
Walls
The stone walls are part of this system.
They extend beyond the buildings and begin to organise the site itself: guiding movement, screening entrances, holding gardens, creating shade and negotiating the distance between neighbouring dwellings. At some points they protect, elsewhere they frame a view or become porous enough to connect one space with another.
Architecture therefore does not end at the façade.
The spaces between buildings become part of the project: a shaded lane before an entrance, a small garden beside a wall, a glimpse of the sea at the end of a passage, an olive tree encountered along the way, a threshold where private life briefly touches shared space.
The intention is for the settlement to be experienced as a continuous inhabited landscape rather than as a collection of detached objects.
Gumno
At the centre of the settlement, the network of smaller spaces opens into a larger one: the gumno, the traditional Dalmatian threshing ground.
Historically, the gumno was productive ground, but it could also become a place of gathering. It was neither a formal square nor entirely private. Its collective role developed through use.
The gumno in KAAMEN remains similarly open. It is a pause within the denser fabric, a place where routes cross and the private rhythm of the houses meets a shared space.
An existing tree remains at its centre. The composition simply makes room for something that was already there.
Landscape
The Mediterranean landscape is not treated as scenery behind the architecture. Rocky ground, sun, wind, dry vegetation, cultivated gardens, herbs, olives and deep shade are part of the spatial structure of the project.
Small planted areas and productive gardens enter between the buildings, so architecture and landscape are developed together.
Climate is first addressed spatially. Walls, vegetation, depth and proximity provide shade. Outdoor rooms are protected rather than simply opened toward the view. Compactness reduces the amount of exposed building envelope, while landscape contributes to the microclimate.
Materials are selected for durability, repair and long use. The aim is simple: fewer elements, used carefully, doing more than one job.
Luxury
Along the Adriatic coast, luxury is often associated with separation: the detached villa, uninterrupted views, a private pool and as little contact with neighbours as possible.
KAAMEN proposes another possibility.
Privacy remains important, but it is created through thresholds, walls, vegetation and spatial distance rather than complete isolation. Each dwelling belongs to a larger order of passages, gardens and shared spaces.
This is perhaps the most relevant lesson of the traditional village today. Its value lies less in a particular architectural language than in the way it holds individual and collective life together: compactness instead of sprawl, shared ground instead of endless duplication, climatic intelligence embedded in spatial organisation, and the understanding that the quality of a settlement depends as much on its voids as on its buildings.
KAAMEN is not a reconstruction of a Dalmatian village. It uses the village as a spatial reference for questions that remain current: how closely to build, what to leave open, how to establish privacy without isolation, what can be shared, and how architecture can become part of a landscape rather than simply occupy it.