New gallery in Plzeň will be a solid and shapely building

Ladislav Kuba, Tomáš Pilař

Plzeň - The new building of the West Bohemian Gallery in Plzeň is expected to take the form of a solid, geometrically clean, and simple house. Inside the transparent envelope, there will be four stacked blocks with individual operations. This was decided by a nine-member jury, which selected the winning design from the architects Ladislav Kuba and Tomáš Pilař. According to the jury, their solution reflects the dynamics of the present time, fits into the given context, and promises the creation of a remarkable modern building. The gallery, which is expected to cost around half a billion crowns, should be completed in 2014.
    "The jury selected from 88 designs, and managed to find a modern, honest, and good house for the gallery," said the vice-chairman of the jury, Jiří Kotalík. He noted that the winning design is professional, balanced, fits very well into the environment near the central square, and warmly presents its entrance section towards the historical core of the city.
    The façade of the pentagon consists of a reinforced concrete skeleton. "Glass blocks with LEDs are inserted into the shell, allowing permeability and creating a variable information surface on which various inscriptions can be displayed," Kotalík added. The project accounts for natural daylight that will penetrate the gallery from above and also offers multifunctional grand spaces for exhibitions.
    "The shape of the object's floor plan is based on the street lines of the surrounding buildings and revokes the floor plan and volumetric traces of the demolished apartment building. It has a favorable mass and height impact," Kotalík further stated. According to him, architects Pilař and Kuba are proven and high-quality professionals. Among other things, they designed the library of the Faculty of Philosophy at Masaryk University in Brno, the Omega department store in Brno, the embassy in Vilnius, Lithuania, and the state library in Ostrava, also known as the so-called black cube.
    The prestigious commission for the gallery, which will be located in an attractive spot U Zvonu in the center of Plzeň, attracted renowned architects from across the republic and beyond. Architects from Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Slovakia, and others applied. The jury selected the winner after a three-day meeting. The chairman of the committee was a prominent architect and urban planner Martin Rajniš, known for, among other things, co-authoring the new Post Office building on Sněžka.
    According to the director of the West Bohemian Gallery, Roman Musil, the gallery in Plzeň will be one of the first objects conceived from the beginning as an art museum. "The winning design was absolutely the best from the gallery's perspective," he stated.
    Discussions about the construction of a new gallery in Plzeň have been ongoing since the establishment of the West Bohemian Gallery in 1954. The gallery will offer a main exhibition hall with a capacity of 300 people, a hall for temporary exhibitions, space for new depositories, a café, and more.
    The region plans to obtain at least 150 to 200 million crowns from EU programs for part of the costs. If everything goes smoothly, the gallery could begin construction at the end of 2010.