Czech Chamber of Architects supported the "Black Cube" in Ostrava

The Czech Chamber of Architects (ČKA) has decided to support the construction of the new building of the State Scientific Library of the Moravian-Silesian Region, which is known among the people of Ostrava as the Black Cube and whose construction was canceled by the regional leadership in June of this year. The Chamber thus defends not only the realization of the exceptional design by the Brno architects Ladislav Kuba and Tomáš Pilař, which won the architectural competition in 2004, but also points out the necessity of transparency in public procurement, efficient and prudent handling of financial resources, and recommends seeking the most suitable solution through regular architectural competitions.

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The Czech Chamber of Architects was informed about the decision of the Moravian-Silesian Regional Council not to award the public contract for the construction of the State Scientific Library of the Moravian-Silesian Region to the winners of the architectural competition, architects Ladislav Kuba and Tomáš Pilař [Atelier Kuba Pilař Architects], citing excessively high investment costs. Instead of awarding the contract based on a very widely and richly attended architectural competition, another method of awarding the contract is to be used.

The Czech Chamber of Architects fundamentally rejects this decision as unfounded. The method of selecting the contractor for the construction project through an architectural competition with the participation of a highly qualified jury, which included significant experts from the field of librarianship, represents the most transparent form of awarding a public contract, while the procedure proposed by the regional representatives completely lacks this transparency. Furthermore, this approach completely excludes effective control of the construction contractor by a project independently prepared and independently monitored without regard to the construction contractor.

Awarding public contracts through architectural competitions as a publicly controllable form is a cornerstone in cultivating the investment environment in general, and particularly in the public sector, namely for the most common and significant contracts—contracts for public buildings. While in other European Union countries this procedure is an established and recognized, very often used form, in the Czech environment of backroom manipulations and machinations, it finds it very difficult to establish a modus vivendi.

The desperate situation of the scientific library in Ostrava has long required radical solutions. Nevertheless, from the very beginning, the effort for an architectural competition was met with resistance, which, however, was managed to be overcome by the activity of several personalities. In 2004, an architectural competition was announced (investor MSK), the course of which was very successful and which produced an unconventional result in the form of the winning design by architects Kuba and Pilař, authors of several other similar buildings and winners of several architecturally well and richly attended competitions. "Dependent" members (from the MSK Council), librarians (director of SVK Prague M. Svoboda, director of VK in Ostrava L. Prchalová) collaborated very actively with "independent" representatives of the architectural profession (jury chairman M. Masák) and praised the precision of the ČKA Competition Rules. The then governor of MSK Tošenovský was very pleased with the outcome.

In comparing the investment costs of buildings already realized at approximately 12,000 CZK/m³ at VTK in Prague Dejvice with the investment costs for the VK MSK building estimated at about 10,000 CZK/m³, it is evident that these costs correspond to the standard that a scientific library for the 21st century should provide. Any reduction of this standard will only yield half-hearted results and will represent a significant loss for the cultivation of the public procurement environment as well as for the culture of the Moravian-Silesian region.

The Czech Chamber of Architects supports the establishment of a representative and 21st-century-compliant scientific library building, resulting from a proper architectural competition, in the interest of the Moravian-Silesian Region and the development of architecture in this region, and openly warns against procedures on the edge of or even beyond the law. Numerous other cases in the past have shown that contracts awarded in an opaque and publicly uncontrollable manner ended, due to the absence of an effective control system, with much higher investment costs incurred; there is a reasonable fear that this fate may also befall the State Scientific Library of the Moravian-Silesian Region.