The winner of the Kaplicky Internship program is Ondřej Pokoj

Prague - The winner of the Kaplicky Internship program, which supports architecture students, has today become Ondřej Pokoj, a graduate of the Czech Technical University. He won with a project called Transferium Prague, which plays with the idea of completing Prague's airport as a hub for high-speed trains and metro. The new buildings have organic shapes, and the author proposed a partially aluminum facade, which is translucent in places and is suspended on steel columns and other beams.

Thanks to his victory, Pokoj will have the opportunity to undertake a three-month internship at the British studio Heatherwick. The studio is now known in the Czech Republic as well, as it is set to renovate and extend the Savarin Palace and adjacent buildings in the city center according to its design. The founder of the studio, Thomas Heatherwick, was in Prague a month ago, and his colleague Mat Cash was on the jury that selected Pokoj among six finalists from students and recent graduates of architectural fields from Czech universities.

Alongside Mat Cash, the jury included architect and university educator Michal Kohout, architectural historian Zdeněk Lukeš, and director of the Design Museum in London Deyan Sudjic. The honorary member of the jury is Eliška Kaplický Fuchsová.

The Heatherwick Studio is one of the most respected architectural firms in the world. In September, Thomas Heatherwick presented in Prague, among other things, the transformation of an old silo in Cape Town into the Zeitz MOCAA museum of contemporary African art. This is a building that was one of the most discussed last year on a global scale.

The studio is behind projects all over the world, such as the new headquarters for the giant Google in London and California, an organically conceived study center in Singapore, the new futuristic Pier 55 park, and the unique public space Vessel in New York, or the British pavilion at Expo 2010. The studio also gained fame for the new design of London double-deckers. Among the latest projects is the reconstruction of the 130-year-old London exhibition center Olympia.