Old Customs House

Year2001

CategoryOffices

LocationPrague

StatusCompleted

The Old Customs House building is the result of an architectural competition, and its design is based on respect for the historic urban structure as well as the need to create a contemporary building with its own identity.

The urban concept preserves the fundamental attributes of the place – the hall, the veduta and the articulation of volumes – and works with them as the starting principles for the new development. The original building and the new build are not linked by an effort at formal similarity, but through a dialogue between two different generations of architecture. The distance between them expresses historical distance, while the spatial and operational connection creates continuity between old and new.

The design also compares two different ways of creating a high-quality indoor environment. While the original building relies on the natural properties of traditional materials, the new part uses contemporary technologies and building services. The whole thus builds on a continuity of principles rather than forms, combining historical experience with the possibilities of contemporary architecture.

Design team	Martin Krupauer

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Dialogue between old and new

The buildings are historically distant, yet close in the very principle of how they have been and will be used by people.

In the original building, the quality and comfort of the environment were ensured by traditional materials. In the new building, this role is taken over by highly sophisticated building services.

In their engineering perfection, the new technologies should offer the same environmental quality that traditional materials naturally created in the original buildings.

Transparency, light and layering of space

The design works with the elegance and poetry of transparency, the layering of spaces and the play of light and colour, which also called for a considerably more demanding architectural and technical solution.

South façade

The south façade is a distinctive feature of the building. Its form is not a gratuitous formal gesture, but stems from a specific requirement to shade this side of the building.

This purely functional principle is monumentalised and becomes a striking architectural element. The richness of the architectural form is thus directly linked to the requirements of building physics and the technical performance of the building.