Prague Archaeology Museum
Site of this project is very complicated, it is the interface of two different urban principles. Old city structure of Malá strana and latter structure of Karlin from 19th century. This results in enormouse amount of impulses from surrounding area, I tried to pick only the most importnat ones for me. The most important is accentuation of the connection between new building and the City of Prague Museum, new museum will serve as an complementary building to the old one and it is still going to be same institution. I placed the current museum into the center of my design, circles from this center will influence not just the volume of my design, but also landcaping of the area between both museums. Prague archeology museum is imaginary coming from ground as lot of archeological artefacts does. From the whole volume of site coming up is by one of the circles created void area, serving as an public space in front of the entry to museum. This cut will create different type of facade, which will showcase the museum to the outside world, especially using potential of North-South highway going through the city right next to the site of new museum. Important for my project is also history of this place, especially railway station Těšnov, which has been here before and was torn down because of highway in 1985.
Main urban design idea for this project was to refer to the old museum building and thereby clearly show the connection between these buildings. For that I used system of circles with museum in its center. One of these circles created southern facade of my museum. These circles will be readible also in materials of public space and sidewalks around both museums. For this project I used double skin facade, with corten steel for the external layer. By punching different size of holes in to the corten steel, I am able create various images reffering to the archaeology and in place reffering to the legacy of Těšnov railway station. In exactly the same place where original arch was, I recreated it, in the corten facade.
This project was bachelor thesis at the Faculty of Architecture at CTU. Part of the project was not just developing the concept idea but also creating construction documents, structural plans, details, static calculations etc. It obviuosly had some influence on the project in the latter phase and it slightly changed, but I was still able to retain the original ideas from the architectural study.
