To support the preservation of a brutalist building in Prague, dozens of people gathered

Prague – In support of the preservation of the brutalist administrative building, which previously housed the Military Construction Enterprise, about fifty people gathered today near the Nuselský Bridge in Prague 2. The building is threatened with demolition. The building's owner, Jizera Invest, requested permission for demolition from the construction department of the Prague 2 district at the beginning of September, iROZHLAS.cz reported last week.

"This is not just about this building. In the last ten years, we have demolished several unique brutalist buildings. Prague is thus losing an entire chapter from the history of architectural culture. Prague was listed on the UNESCO list not only because of its amazing baroque, gothic, and other historical monuments but also due to the symbiotic connection with early and late modernism. And we are very quickly losing that," said the event's organizer Pavel Karous from the association Vetřelci a volavky to the participants of the protest. The vice-chairwoman of the Club for Old Prague, Kateřina Bečková, expressed similar sentiments.

Karous described the meeting in front of the building on Božena Němcová Street as part of the fight for late modernist and brutalist architecture. He reminded that brutalist buildings such as Transgas or Hotel Praha have already been demolished in Prague. Other buildings constructed in this style are at risk of demolition.

According to Karous, there is no reason to demolish the building, designed by architect Jan Hančl in 1973, located in Prague's heritage reserve between two 19th-century houses. He stated that it is a building of architectural, cultural, and also technical value, which stands above a metro tunnel and respects the surrounding development. He noted that the National Heritage Institute also disagrees with the demolition, stating that the demolition of the building is unacceptable from a preservation perspective. In contrast, the Department of Heritage Care of the city's magistrate has accepted the possibility of demolition. According to an information panel placed on the building, signed by Antonín Rosa, the assessment by Prague's conservationists mentions, among other things, that it is an architecturally average building, some parts of which have been replaced with modern metal structures and other non-original materials.

The building was previously covered by an advertising tarp and a large LED screen from BigBoard. Legal disputes ensued over the placement of the advertisement. Due to copyright infringement, the building's author Hančl also sought the removal of the advertising structures, as the architect said today. The city leadership began to criticize the advertisement on the building in the summer of 2020, and the company Samsung, which advertised on the surface, subsequently had the advertisement removed. The operator then replaced it with a photograph of Milada Horáková and later with a banner promoting the Czech Basketball Federation. Finally, in September 2020, the advertising operator agreed to the complete removal of the tarp, as representatives of the Association of Outdoor Advertising Operators and the Prague magistrate reported at that time.

Brutalism is an international architectural style from the turn of modernism and postmodernism, characterized among other things by acknowledged construction, material, and spatial solutions. In Czechoslovakia, buildings in this style were designed mainly at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s.