National Museum is 80 percent complete, people will see it on Saturday

Prague - Work on the reconstruction of the historical building of the National Museum is 80 percent complete. Both courtyards are covered, work is being completed on making the dome accessible, technology is being installed, the facade is being finished, and restored large windows and floors are being installed. All restoration work is also 80 percent complete. Today, the museum director Michal Lukeš told ČTK that interested parties will be able to see this during Saturday's open house.

For example, the covered courtyards are among the spaces that will expand the museum after its reopening. Visitors will also be able to view them on Saturday. "Unfortunately, for safety reasons, we cannot yet make the dome of the National Museum accessible for such a large number of people, but it will also be a public space once completed," Lukeš said.

The repaired building will be 99 percent open to visitors. "This is also one of the purposes of the reconstruction. We are making accessible areas that were originally storage or office spaces," he said, adding that at the NM, it's not true that during an open house one can see what is not available during regular operations; according to him, the museum will be open to the public in its entirety.

However, visitors will not yet see what the new permanent exhibits in both buildings, which are currently being created, will look like. "We are planning a separate presentation. We expect that many people will come to see the construction, so there won't be the possibility to delve into all the topics in detail. We will try to show what is new in the building, what has changed, how it has been modernized in contrast to how frightening it looked before the reconstruction," says the director.

The building, which has been closed since 2011 and has been under construction for three years, will be put into trial operation and opened to visitors on October 28th to mark the 100th anniversary of Czechoslovakia. In addition to the Czech-Slovak exhibition mapping the lives of Czechs and Slovaks in a common state, the first visitors will see the exhibition "200 years/200 objects" for the two-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the National Museum and an exhibition about the historical building itself. "After that, the building will be permanently open, and more exhibitions and displays will be added; we plan to open 80 percent of the exhibitions in the fall of 2019, and the rest by June 30, 2020."

The building, which largely resembled the era of its inception in the 19th century, will, according to Lukeš, become a museum of the 21st century upon opening. "Part of the museum, especially for exhibitions from abroad and rare items, will be equipped with above-standard security systems. The climate was not regulated at all, we will now have centralized technology. There will be vault showcases for the most precious exhibits and special 'cold' light in the displays," says the director.

Regarding the contracted price of 1.64 billion crowns for the reconstruction of the building, Lukeš stated that additional work has amounted to 6.2 percent of the original price, or about 102 million crowns. "It was primarily caused by the more complicated geological subsoil during the construction of the underground parts, archaeological findings, the removal of asbestos and cork flooring, as well as the requirements of conservationists," he explained.