In June, an exhibition FUTURE SYSTEMS will open in Budějovice

FUTURE SYSTEMS
June 18 - September 12, 2009
House of Art České Budějovice
curator Michal Škoda
opening on Wednesday, June 17 at 6:00 PM



As part of exhibitions focused on contemporary architecture, the House of Art in České Budějovice has prepared a presentation of the studio Future Systems for this summer. At the helm of this architectural-design studio was Jan Kaplický (1937 - 2009), who founded it in London (where he emigrated in '68) in 1979.
      Thanks to original ideas, timeless projects, and unique opinions, Jan Kaplický became very well-respected, and the company soon gained prominence. This was followed by numerous awards, the most important of which was the "Stirling Prize," which they received for the outstanding building Lords Media Center in London. Among their realizations, it is also worth mentioning the department store Selfridges in Birmingham (1999) and the "underground" house completed in 1994 in Wales. In our territory, to date, one can only recognize the villa and a small house in Prague from the "pre-emigration" period of Kaplický.
      In 2006, Jan Kaplický and Future Systems won an international competition for the construction of the National Library in Prague at Letná. The fate of this building is still unclear. The first opportunity for us to become acquainted with the work of Future Systems on our territory appears to be one of Jan Kaplický's latest projects – the concert and congress center in České Budějovice. This groundbreaking design for Czech standards was commissioned by the South Bohemian Society of Friends of Music and, with the support of the city, intends to build it in the Čtyři dvory district.
      It is again a very original building, elongated in a triangular shape, with a black, elegant color used in its undulating exterior cladding, which features two large round windows. The interior of the unusually shaped object hides several separate usable spaces in the back upon entry and a large spacious entrance hall in shades of blue. Under these spaces is an underground parking lot with an unconventional entrance along the building itself. In the hall's spaces, in addition to the necessary café-type seating and mature trees, a wide spiral staircase leads to two listening halls.
      The halls, which will bear the names of Ema Destinnová and Karel Ančerla, will serve up to one hundred members of the symphony orchestra. The larger, orange hall will have a capacity of about one thousand seats, while the smaller, yellow hall will accommodate about four hundred. Both listening spaces will be fluidly shaped, meaning there will be no sharp corners, equipped with special seating, and, above all, will offer a very unconventional view of the landscape, which can be interrupted by a projection screen.
      As is common in the latest projects of Future Systems, the concert and congress center building has also been designed with the use of an atypical, almost futuristic roof cladding. Relatively small black circular scales uniformly cover the entire roof, allowing it to be undulating and bending into nearly any shape. In the Czech Republic, this construction, in terms of shape, capacity, and acoustics, represents an exceptional building that could begin construction as early as 2010.
      Due to its timeliness, this project has also become a key topic of the Future Systems exhibition at the House of Art, not only to present the exceptional nature of Jan Kaplický but also to offer the general public the chance to become acquainted with this remarkable building.