HB Reavis wants to demolish a building at the beginning of Vinohradská in Prague

Prague - The developer group HB Reavis, owned by Slovak billionaire Ivan Chrenko, plans to demolish the former headquarters of the Central Bohemian Energy Company on Vinohradská Street in the center of Prague, where the client center of the General Health Insurance Company (VZP) is currently located. In its place, modern office buildings will be constructed. This was reported by ČTK based on data from the EIA database, where the plan was submitted by the group's subsidiary, Phibell. The developer acquired the two buildings and land between Vinohradská, Římská, and Rubešova streets last year from ČEZ.
    The buildings, constructed in the brutalist style, have been classified by Radomíra Sedláková, a curator of architecture at the National Gallery, among architecturally significant structures in Prague from 1850 to 2000. Brutalism, a style employed from the 1960s to the 1980s, is often informally associated with the regime that ruled at the time, but such structures were also built in the West. They are still waiting for wider professional acceptance, and there is ongoing debate about whether such buildings deserve heritage protection, for instance, in the case of the Thermal hotel in Karlovy Vary, designed by the Machonin couple.
    The former Central Dispatch of the Transit Gas Pipeline and two office buildings on Vinohradská Street were built from 1970 to 1978, with architects Václav Aulický, Jiří Eisenreich, Ivo Loos, and Jindřich Malátek. Aulický is mainly known for technical structures, including the Žižkov television tower, whose reputation was adversely affected primarily by its chosen location. The transmitter project began in 1978 but was not completed until 1991. In addition to his work as an architect, he has been active at the Faculty of Architecture at the Czech Technical University since 2005.
    According to the documentation, the developer plans to construct an administrative building with six to eight above-ground floors and two to three underground floors. "The existing structures on the construction site will be demolished," the documentation states. The gross floor area of the above-ground part is expected to exceed 26,000 m², with 13,500 m² underground. The current 70 parking spaces will increase to 220 in the future.
    The company did not specify when it plans to begin construction. Additionally, the municipal environmental protection department has now decided that the project could significantly impact the environment and public health. Therefore, the investor must prepare an EIA report assessing the construction's environmental impact. Only after that can they apply for a land-use decision and building permit.
    At the end of the first half of the year, there was a total of 3.13 million m² of modern office space in Prague, with another 138,000 m² under construction. Vacancies accounted for 16.6 percent, or 517,900 m².
    The international developer group HB Reavis, originally from Slovakia, is based in Luxembourg and operates in Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, the United Kingdom, and Turkey. The group was founded in 1993 and manages assets worth 1.8 billion euros. The total leasable area of the properties it has built exceeds 750,000 square meters. An additional one million square meters of office space is either under construction, planned, or for which it is obtaining building permits. The latest project in the Czech Republic is the Metronom Business Center administrative building above the Nové Butovice metro station.