The architect Martin Roubík has died

Photo: Petr Jedinák

On September 9, 2008, after a brief illness, a prominent figure in the Czech architectural scene passed away in Prague at the age of 58, co-founder of the legendary world architectural group Snohetta, co-author of the Alexandria Library, author of the reconstruction of the Czech Embassy in Oslo, and other buildings both in the Czech Republic and abroad.

Martin Roubík studied at the Prague Academy of Art, Architecture and Design and at the School of Architecture in Oslo, where he moved in the early 1970s, as well as at the Yokohama Design Research Institute. After graduation, he joined the studio Lund + Slaatto Arkitekter in Oslo, co-founded the ROM architecture foundation in 1987, and a year later the now legendary world group Snohetta, with which he won an international competition for the Alexandria Library in Egypt. With this office, he constructed other significant buildings in the 1990s, such as the Art Museum in Lillehammer, a bridge over a fjord in Telemark; he competed for the design of a new airport in Oslo-Hurum. He is the author of the reconstruction of the Czech Embassy in Oslo and originally ambitious proposals for the reconstruction of the Fig House in the Royal Garden of Prague Castle and other buildings in the Czech Republic and abroad. He successfully participated, both personally and as the head of the GEM architects office, in numerous international and domestic competitions, and his last major success was his design in the competition for the Grand Egyptian Museum – the awarded project became part of the collection of modern architecture at the National Gallery in Prague.

As an educator, he initially worked in Trondheim, Norway, and later, in the early 90s and until the middle of the first decade of this century, primarily at the Faculty of Architecture at the Czech Technical University in Prague. He was also elected dean of the Faculty of Architecture at the Technical University in Liberec but was not appointed rector. He lectured in Gothenburg, Oxford, Aarhus in Denmark, and also in Cairo, and his work has been reported on by leading international professional journals.

His refined relationship to justice and public matters recently led him to the role of a representative of Czech and foreign architects criticizing the course of the competition for the National Library. Unfortunately, he did not live to see the fulfillment of the demand for “acceptance of responsibility on the part of the leadership of the NK for failures in legal and ethical terms”, which his colleagues and companions Emil Přikryl, Jan Línek, Bjarke Ingels, and others addressed to public life representatives in the Czech Republic.