The Grand Prix of Architects was awarded for the transformation of the spa in Liberec into a gallery

Prague - The Grand Prix of Architects 2014 was awarded to the reconstruction of the municipal baths in Liberec into a gallery, designed by the SIAL studio. The architects also added a depository to the buildings of the baths from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The international jury, which selected the project as the winner from 69 entries in the competition, praised that the authors managed to maintain "the relationship between the historical and the new in a desirable balance."
    The results were announced today at the Trade Fair Palace, where an exhibition of all the competition entries will last until June 13. The lifetime achievement award went to architect Zdeněk Edel, among other things the author of the elegant Parkhotel in Holešovice. Together with other colleagues, he designed the building for the foreign trade company KOVO near the Libeň Bridge and the building of the Vršovice Town Hall. His name is not very well known, but according to architectural historian Zdeněk Lukeš, his work belongs to the best "that has arisen in our difficult era of recent decades."
    "The project intelligently captured the spatial and architectural potential of the existing architecture, supplemented by the necessary background for the new function in a separate, simple mass of the new depository," stated Magdalena Jetelová, the chairwoman of the jury, regarding the awarded Liberec conversion. According to her, the mutual interaction and sovereign relationship between historical and contemporary architectural elements is characteristic of this building from details to the whole.
    The depository designed by the SIAL team, which included Karel Novotný, Jiří Buček, Petr Čihák, Jan Duda, Jana Hlavová, and Filip Horatschke, already received the Award of the Club for Old Prague in February for the best new building in a historic environment.
    In a total of six categories, the international jury, which changes every year and, according to the organizers, ensures an objective view of Czech architecture from the outside, awarded 16 prizes including honorable mentions. The projects, which must be submitted by the architects themselves according to the competition conditions, were evaluated by the jury in the first round based on photographs, and approximately half were then visited by the jurors.
    In the new building category, the Kraličák mountain guesthouse in Hynčice pod Sušinou by the Ječmen studio won. The unconventional mountain building, situated in open countryside above the village, has the shape of a truncated hexagon, with a dark gray facade seamlessly transitioning into the roof. According to Radomíra Sedláková from the architecture collection of the National Gallery in Prague, this building is one of those that cannot be assessed without a personal visit to the site.
    "The goal of the design was to create a contemporary architectural form in the mountainous environment of open meadows. The guesthouse, with its architectural expression, does not want to expand the development of the village characterized by recreational buildings of traditional shapes. The building was designed as a natural object under the forest," the authors write about their project on the website. The cohesive shape of the house is intended to evoke the idea of a natural volume, flat stone standing upright on the open plain.
    As the best family house, the jury selected the building by the KSA studio in Mníšek pod Brdy. With Ján Studený and Pavel Mejtský, it was also contributed to by the now-deceased architect David Kopecký. "The Family House category is one of the youngest in the competition, but family houses are becoming a phenomenon nowadays, they are the most common work of Czech architects," stated Sedláková, referring to the rather infrequent collaboration between large developers or public administration and architects.