Open House will showcase eco-friendly buildings and vacant houses of the city

Prague - The fifth festival Open House Prague, which allows architecture enthusiasts to peek into places that are usually inaccessible, has newly prepared two thematic sections. One will showcase environmentally friendly houses and the other will feature buildings owned by Prague, including those that have no current use. Among the six constructions, alongside Renaissance or First Republic palaces, is the Great Strahov Stadium. The largest stadium in the world is a cultural monument, but it is also utilized minimally. The festival organizers showed it to journalists today, and interested parties can come and see it along with another eighty objects on May 18 and 19.

From the buildings belonging to the city, for which Prague has no current use, people can visit the Desfours Palace in Florence, which is only occasionally opened for some cultural events. Inside the palace are artistically and craftily valuable interiors. Like it, the Renaissance House of the Pages of the Lords of Martinic in Hradčany is also a protected monument. It gets its name from the reign of Rudolf II, who housed pages here. The famous Baroque architect Carlo Lurago contributed to its reconstruction. Its last inhabitants were city officials, who left in 2008, and it has been empty since.

For more than ten years, a block of historically valuable houses near Old Town Square, known as the Town Hall Houses, has also been empty. The houses U Zlatého rohu and U Minuty opened the Prague Creative Center in 2017, and the new political representation of the Prague city council promises to revive the remaining spaces.

A specific building managed by the city is the Great Strahov Stadium, which also has no current use today. The construction, with a capacity of 250,000 seats, was opened in 1926 for the universal Sokol gatherings, and after the Sokol was dissolved by the communists, Spartakiad events were held at the stadium from 1955. The last one was in 1985, and the renewed XII. Universal Sokol gathering was held in 1994 with the participation of President Václav Havel, but subsequent gatherings took place at the adjacent Rošický Stadium or elsewhere.

The enormous construction has been unused since the fall of communism and has been deteriorating, with the stands falling into a state of emergency, and at the beginning of the 21st century, there were tendencies to demolish the stadium, which have since been abandoned. Seven football fields were created on the stadium grounds. In 2014, complicated property relations were resolved, and the stadium was transferred to the city, which now wants to develop a land use study for the entire area.

From environmentally friendly buildings, people can visit the Amazon Court, Philadelphia, Inter-Faculty Center for Environmental Sciences II, Křižík Palace II, Quadrio, or the new building of the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Academy of Sciences. The Open House Prague festival has opened 195 buildings over the past four years, which have been visited by 185,000 people.