New house in the center of Pilsen will not just be a store; it will have more functions

existing House of Culture

Plzeň - The Plzeň multifunctional center Corso Americká will have a new design that responds to seven requirements from the city hall and citizens. Unlike the original project, it will not just be a department store, but also a center for culture and leisure. Jan Petřík, the investor's representative, said today to ČTK. The new center, to be built by Amádeus Plzeň for 2.5 billion crowns at the site of the current House of Culture Inwest from 1986, is expected to be completed by 2013. Its demolition will begin at the end of this year and should finish in April.
    "The new five-story center with a usable area of 35,700 m², including warehouses and facilities, will serve several functions. There will be sections for apartments, offices, shops, sports, culture, and parking. A new pedestrian boulevard will be created along Americká," he added. An uncovered leisure center will rise on the roof of the building, where there will be green spaces, plus, for example, a 300-meter long track for inline skating, a climbing wall, large chess, and children's playgrounds.
    The center will include a wing with apartments and offices towards Denisova embankment. "The number of apartments will arise from demand, which we are surveying," he added. The project will also include a separate cultural and social hall with at least 300 seats and a gallery.
    The main features of the building are two glass entrance rotundas. "Amádeus respects all the requirements and regulatory conditions set by the city," Petřík said. These include, apart from multifunctionality, a shift to smaller shops and the creation of a boulevard.
    The investor has recently reduced the number of parking spaces from 720 to 500; currently, there are 300 at the cultural center. He committed to building two additional traffic lanes at the intersection U Jána under Prazdroj, along with six other developers who plan new projects in the area, contributing seven million crowns towards this.
    The regulatory conditions for the investor, which emerged mainly from citizen protests, will be approved by the Plzeň City Council on September 1. "We are in constant talks with representatives of the city. Our accommodating steps towards the city hall will require tens of millions of crowns more. However, the amount of money we can allocate for modifications is almost exhausted," he added. The EIA process is currently underway, with public discussion in October, after which the zoning procedure will begin.
    "Today's presentation is a better variant than the one originally presented. The problem, however, is that the documentation still includes the original variant, meaning that Amádeus is seeking approval for a building without apartments, with a parking lot on the entire roof and the elimination of Denisova embankment," said Martin Marek from the civic association Kultura(k), which collected nearly 9,000 signatures under the petition against the demolition of Inwest. These people will meet at a public meeting in September. We will try to convince them to provide comments on the EIA process. We want to stop the project presented in the documentation, he added.
    The Czech company Amádeus Real a.s. has already built similar multifunctional but smaller centers in Prague, Liberec, Ústí nad Labem, and Hradec Králové.