Diplomas 2019 - 2nd place

School: Faculty of Architecture, Czech Technical University in Prague
Thesis Supervisor: Michal Kuzemenský

Prague is becoming an open-air museum. Public buildings are disappearing from the center. It needs to be restructured. The library has the potential to mobilize its surroundings and clean them up. The ideal area becomes the transport gap between the historical center of Prague, Karlín, and the riverbank. There used to be walls here; today it’s just another impenetrable wall of the highway and roads surrounding the Hilton hotel complex and offices. This generates many non-functional spaces. I am cleaning the area of impenetrable ramps and roads sealing off the existing flow of people. I am selecting the significant position of the Hilton hotel and transforming this symbol of short-term stays into a public function that serves the city's residents daily. I utilize and transform the existing hotel into the National Library. I draw on the tradition of placing public buildings by the river and take into account the vision of the new building of the Czech Philharmonic on the opposite bank. In the past, we transformed "temples of the Lord" into theaters and customs houses. Today, I use the position of the "temple of money" of the hotel and change it into the "temple of memory" of the National Library. The ambition of the National Library is to transform the institution from an information warehouse into a center of cultural activity, technological innovation, and the flow of ideas. The book takes a back seat while society, its meetings, and understanding new technologies and working with them come to the forefront. I create a ring of these possibilities that embraces the central part with a petrified sculpture of books, responsibly fulfilling the function of a library. I adopt the rational construction of the hotel and set it with a skeletal ring that bridges the entire building of the former hotel and expands it. I strip the hotel of ornamentation and enlarge its inner atrium. Atriums and various passages are created throughout the entire ring. The archive is inscribed into the old construction of the hotel, becoming the center of gravity, a petrified sculpture of books. The crown of the library is an empty structure open to alternative uses. The double facade made of glass blocks and clear glass creates a semi-permeable scene of the library; you see only silhouettes, sometimes even more.