A key element in the design of Libor Erban and Jan Benda’s 1970s exhibition pavilion was its massing, with three simple box volumes stacked on top of each other like an inverted pyramid. Over time, this principle became suppressed and unclear. Recovering, redefining and redeveloping it was the main goal of the restoration project. One part of the pavilion reveals its load-bearing structure. New program arrangement is expressed in the combination of solid and translucent forms, with the right-hand side enclosed and the left-hand side more open and airy. The restored pavilion uses new and sophisticated building operation systems, which are not concealed but installed in a new technology tower.

Following the example of its Viking ancestors, Danish architecture is taking the world by storm. Danish architects have always filled architectural news and magazine pages: names like Arne Jacobsen, Jørn Utzon or Henning Larsen are well-known to any architect. But what is it actually, Danish architecture, and why is it discussed everywhere all of the time?...

The new technology center finally embodies the idea of UMPRUM as a fully functioning part of the Prague city center. The building front emphasizes and opens up the main entrance to express the idea of openness and communication. By leaving out the full height of the neo-renaissance facade’s entrance segment, the building demonstrates its transformation from an elementary school to a university. There are two wings of five stories and two basement floors each, offering modern technical rooms and equipment for all study programs and various presentation needs, including technology for the building’s operation. The technical rooms are placed along the sides, lighter uses are concentrated in the center of the layout. All spaces are organized to let in sunlight and to facilitate visual links to the central semi-transparent rooms.

At a prime location in the Prague city centre, just across Old Castle Stairs in Malá Strana, a new contemporary art gallery Kunsthalle Praha was opened in 2022. The former Zenger Electrical Substation building was transformed entirely for the new purpose. The 1930s substation, which actually replaced an even older building of the Bruska Barracks, had a modern, industrial interior hidden behind an unassuming neo-classical facade. The conversion chose a similar approach—preserving the historical frontier due to heritage requirements, but reorganising the interior gallery spaces in a completely new way. Conference rooms, education spaces, a cafe with a terrace, and a ground-floor art shop complement the three separate exhibition halls.

Family home designs often make up the bulk of the work portfolio in smaller architecture studios or individual architect's practices. However, only a few studios can boast such a long list of built projects and extensive experience with this typology as Prague-based Stempel & Tesař architekti. In conversation with professor Ján Stempel and his colleague Jan Jakub Tesař, twenty years his junior, we contemplate the theory and practice of individual living and the (non)existence of trends.