The ministry has halted the assessment of Máj as a potential monument

Prague - The Ministry of Culture has suspended the consideration of the proposal by architectural historian Rostislav Švácha, who requested that the Prague department store Máj/Tesco be declared a cultural monument. The legal representative of the owner requested a suspension of the proceedings until September 1, as he wants to supplement the materials for this process himself. "The Ministry of Culture had no choice but to suspend this administrative proceeding for the requested time in accordance with the administrative code," said Ministry spokeswoman Ludmila Kadrnková to ČTK.
The final deadline for statements in particularly complex cases is 60 days, according to the ministry - without potential suspensions of the proceedings, which is currently happening. So far, 47 days have passed from the initiation of the proceedings to their suspension.
The ministry requested an extract from the real estate cadastre, which it received in April. At the same time, it requested opinions from the state heritage protection and the Institute of Art History at Charles University and the Faculty of Architecture at the Czech Technical University. Tesco requested an extension of the deadline for its statement in May; the ministry set a fifteen-day period, which Tesco considered too short. The ministry extended the deadline to June 9, and on that day, it received a proposal for a suspension of the proceedings from Tesco's legal representative. The reason given was that he was bound by another similar case involving the proceedings to declare the Tesco department store in Pardubice as a cultural monument.
Officials can therefore only start assessing Švácha's request in September. The historian submitted the proposal to the ministry in March in response to information that the building's owner intended to reconstruct it so thoroughly that he would not hesitate to completely replace the structure with a new one. However, officials informed him that they could not initiate the proceedings as the proposal was missing some data, such as the exact land numbers where the building is located. In April, Švácha thus wrote to the minister that his subordinates were complicating the declaration of the proposed objects as cultural monuments with unnecessary delays.
"I think that the public is eagerly awaiting a debate on the heritage value of relatively young buildings, but the ministry prefers to choose a path of bureaucratic obstacles and power demonstrations," the historian believes. Delays in declaring modern, as well as older buildings a monument have often resulted in their irreparable damage or complete destruction in the past.
The reason for submitting the proposal was also the discussion about the alleged intention of the owner of Tesco to demolish the building and construct a new one. The owner now only talks about a renovation. More generally, however, Švácha and other experts emphasize the need for modern architectural monuments to receive attention. While historians have the support of the broadest public regarding older buildings, constructions from the last 50 years are not perceived as monuments, even though they are often unique objects.
Like Máj, Švácha proposed last year to declare the Ještěd department store in Liberec, which also belongs to Tesco and which plans to build anew after its demolition, as a monument. He was not successful, while he managed to get four buildings approved - the Ještěd transmitter, which even became a national cultural monument last year and aspires to be on the UNESCO list, the Federal Assembly building, a hotel building in Prague on Invalidovna, and the Institute of Macromolecular Chemistry in Prague on Petřiny.
Švácha is convinced that for every historical period, a representative sample of buildings should remain as a mark of the era. "I assume that there could be about 20 from the 1970s and 1980s," he believes. Besides the Ještěd department store in Liberec and the four mentioned monuments, he would like to preserve the Prague buildings Kotva or the House of Housing Culture. However, even with modern monuments, differentiation is necessary - Švácha and other experts express their absolute rejection of the Congress Center.

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Švácha submitted a proposal to declare Máj a monument >