ÚOHS will not deal with the competition for the author of the National Library's building

Brno - The Antimonopoly Office will not deal with the selection of the architect for the new headquarters of the National Library in Prague. The administrative proceedings, which were initiated at the request of one of the unsuccessful studios - HŠH architects, have been halted. The Office for the Protection of Competition (ÚOHS) is not authorized to assess this architectural competition, said the office's spokesman Kristián Chalupa to ČTK today.
  The evaluation committee selected the controversial proposal by Jan Kaplický, while HŠH architects finished third with a building shaped like a large coffee bean covered with a seamless silver shell. They asked the ÚOHS to overturn the decision on the winner of the competition and move their proposal to second place. "The public competition for a design is not included among the types of procurement procedures. Therefore, the Office does not have the authority to intervene in the course of the design competition," explained Chalupa.
  Kaplický's futuristic building in green, nicknamed for example "the octopus," evokes various impressions. Some architects and even President Václav Klaus have opposed it.
  The architects from the HŠH studio see the problem mainly in the fact that the winning proposal does not comply with the original conditions. The library originally required that the largest volume of the building, i.e., the book storage, be above ground. Jan Kaplický's Future Systems studio has placed it underground, which allowed them to reduce the mass of the above-ground part of the building.
  The library claims that the competition rules allow adjustments to the conditions after the first round. The wording of the rules of the International Union of Architects (UIA), which the competition followed, states that if necessary, the jury may clarify or emphasize certain points of the assignment at the end of the first round. According to representatives of HŠH, it is therefore inadmissible to adjust or even change the conditions.
  Seven other Czech studios also protested against the alleged violation of the competition conditions at the Czech Chamber of Architects.