Train station in the center

The architectural competition for the railway station in Brno has its hidden "Black Peter." The Dutch architect offered a variant of an expanded station in its current location.
The proposal of how the main railway station should look, created by Dutch architect Erick van Egeraat, acted like a red rag to a bull for the representatives of the Brno city hall. His firm EEA entered the conceptual competition for the design of the new train hub but boycotted the basic requirement - to draw the station in its relocated position.
The city council announced the results of the competition at a press conference last week but did not mention the "partisan work."
The EEA office developed a project for a giant underground station in the city center, while the existing historic building would remain part of the station. A new square would be created at the outlet of Masaryk Avenue. The authors also created several computer visualizations. “We invested two million crowns into the project because we believe in its correctness. The city should grow naturally and remain a whole,” said Erick van Egeraat, who took on the work partly because his wife is from Brno.
The jury evaluated sixteen projects, and it immediately disqualified only one - the EEA proposal. “We didn't even look at it because the author addressed a completely different assignment. Someone put in too much work, which must have cost a lot of money, but the affected party had to know that they were not fulfilling the conditions and would be excluded,” said former chief city architect Jaroslav Josífek, who sat on the jury.
Several questions arise: Why did a prestigious architectural office spend millions knowing they had no chance of success? Is it a provocation, orchestrated by activists behind the scenes who do not want the station to be relocated? Is this an attempt to gain publicity through disruption?
Bronislav Benedek from the Prague branch of EEA denies this. “We are independent of any group. As an internationally recognized studio, we carry out hundreds of projects and do not need to artificially provoke any outrage,” he claims. He added that an underground station would save the city money. “We believe that the conceptual competition should have brought various ideas, but the tender had the conditions so narrowly defined in advance that it was pointless,” Benedek thinks. The company management has not yet decided whether to legally challenge the verdict of the Brno jury.
EEA is currently preparing, for example, River Park in Bratislava, a complex of hotels, restaurants, apartments, and offices on the banks of the Danube under the castle.
The chief juror, Prague architect Josef Pleskot, believes that the EEA proposal might not have been bad. “It can be discussed, but the rules of the competition are fixed. Otherwise, someone might come up with the idea that the station should be in the north of the city,” said Pleskot.
In the final evaluation of the projects, there are only two sentences for the EEA proposal; among other things, it states that “the relocated solution was not the subject of the competition assignment.”