New architecture award attracted half as many authors as last year

Prague - In the second year of the new award for domestic architects, half as many projects have been submitted compared to last year's pilot year. The spokesperson for the organizing Czech Chamber of Architects, Zuzana Hošková, announced today to ČTK that 249 works are competing for the award. The competition catalog is available on the website. Last year, an international jury for the Czech Architecture Award selected from 475 architectural works. The main award went to the house and studio Zen-Houses by architect Petr Stolín.

Just like last year, architects can submit works created over the past five years this year as well. However, a whole third of the submissions last year were from 2015, the last possible year. There might be significant interest from architects due to the new competition format. Few have applied for a similar award granted by the Association of Architects in recent years.

The spokesperson stated today that almost half of the total number of applications were completed last year, with another 50 from 2015. Traditionally, Prague leads in regions, accounting for about a third of the submitted buildings, with 83 entries. A total of 35 entries are from the South Moravian Region, of which 26 are directly from Brno.

Following with 13 realizations are the Hradec Králové and South Bohemian Regions, with 12 submitted realizations credited to the Liberec Region, 11 from Vysočina, and ten from Zlín and Pardubice Regions. No building from the Karlovy Vary Region was submitted to this year's competition exhibition, which was represented last year by the Klášter Nový dvůr, a finalist of last year's award.

"This year's edition of the award shows a relatively large representation of private housing, with approximately a hundred submitted works. Compared to last year's edition, there are fewer buildings from public investments. The popular themes of public space or landscape architecture, on which several architectural competitions have successfully taken place in previous years, are only represented by 11 realizations this year," she stated.

The competition conditions allow for resubmission of buildings, but there is a rule that buildings cannot have placed among the nominees in previous years. "The summary of this year's submissions shows that the authors have only marginally utilized the opportunity to submit their work to the competition exhibition again, with no more than ten such works," Hošková told ČTK.

The jury will select a narrower range of realizations to be presented at the nomination evening on June 12 at Pragovka in Prague's Vysočany. The gala evening with the announcement of results will be on November 27 at the Jatka 78 venue. An exhibition of all nominated works will be held from November at the Jaroslav Fragner Gallery in Prague and will move to the Brno Architecture Gallery at the beginning of the year.