Ostrava is looking for a contractor for the renovation of the culture house and the extension of the concert hall

Ostrava - Ostrava is looking for a contractor for the reconstruction of the City Cultural House of Ostrava and the extension of a concert hall. The city council decided today to announce a public tender exceeding the limit. Spokeswoman for the city hall Gabriela Pokorná informed journalists about this. The construction of the new concert hall, according to the design by the American architect Steven Holl, is one of the most controversial projects in the city. The opposition criticizes the project's financial demands and the large financial burden it places on the city. The entire project is expected to cost over four billion crowns, with the construction of the hall itself estimated at about 2.2 billion crowns.

According to the spokesperson, the construction already has the necessary building permit, and now it is waiting for legal validity. The project documentation at the stage for construction execution is also completed. "The concert hall project has progressed since 2018 when the architectural competition was announced, and is now in the phase just before the commencement of the main construction. This is preceded by ongoing preparatory works in the area," said Pokorná.

According to Deputy Mayor Zuzana Bajgarová (formerly ANO), there are several reasons for announcing the public procurement for the construction contractor even before all contracts for external financing are finalized. "The first of these is to verify the feasibility of the project in relation to available financial resources. Only specific offers obtained in the tender will present us with the real price of construction work. Furthermore, it is necessary to work under the assumption that public procurement of this magnitude may take six to twelve months, and considering that the availability of some external resources is time-limited, it would be irresponsible to create unnecessary delays," Bajgarová stated.

The spokesperson added that simultaneously with the announcement of the construction tender, the city council also decided to submit an application for a grant of 600 million crowns, which the city should receive from the state through the Ministry of Culture. "It is extremely efficient to parallelly finalize external financing and public construction procurement, so that the actual start of the main construction work can follow immediately after the contracting of the remaining key external resources. These include grant funds from the state budget through the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, as well as funds from the third pillar of the Just Transition Mechanism, which represents a combination of preferential investment loans from the European Investment Bank and grants from the European Commission," said Mayor Tomáš Macura (formerly ANO). The city aims to have the financing for the construction, including the necessary contractual documentation, ready by September. According to the mayor, the share of non-repayable external sources could exceed 40 percent of the total costs.

With the completion of the project documentation at the stage for construction execution, the spokesperson added that the total costs of the project have also been clarified. According to current estimates, it should be 4.1 billion crowns. "This is an amount that is 0.9 billion crowns, or 28 percent higher than the estimated project costs developed according to previous stages of project documentation and presented to the city councilors a year ago," said Pokorná. The city expects that the competition for the construction contractor might reduce the construction price.

Of the costs, 0.3 billion crowns are allocated for design work, 0.8 billion crowns for the reconstruction of the historical cultural house, and 2.2 billion for the extension of the concert hall. The remaining part, amounting to 0.8 billion crowns, consists of other costs, including funds for the modification of public spaces. The city wants to utilize grants and loans from the European Investment Bank to cover the costs. The construction design emerged from an international architectural competition, in which the New York studio Steven Holl Architects, along with Czech partners Architecture Acts, won. The actual hall is planned to have a capacity of 1,300 seats, but the construction also includes additional facilities such as a multifunctional chamber hall, an educational center, a theater hall, and a recording studio.