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National Library design draws ire

Kaplický's 'octopus' building is part of a community strategy

By Hela Balínová
and Kimberly Ashton
Staff Writers, The Prague Post
March 14th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO

Baroque and Gothic art inspired the design's gold and purple colors.

The new national library to be built in Letná Park is the first Czech building designed by Jan Kaplický, whom many consider to be the country’s best architect. Kaplický, 70, won the National Library’s competition March 2, beating out 355 other architects.

But his unorthodox creation, which some liken to a multicolored octopus, has provoked scoffs from Prague residents who object to such an unusual building being built in the historic district.

“The choice of the winning project for the new building is a win, but at the same time it is a danger, too. Undoubtedly, Prague needs good contemporary architecture … but I am not sure if the buildings can be built anywhere,” Milan Knížák, director of the National Gallery, wrote in Mladá fronta Dnes March 7.

“The location in Letná is not a happy place for this kind of building. Such a ‘strong’ building should be farther from the city center.”

But such buildings are what Kaplický is known for. He founded his firm, Future Systems, in London in 1979 and built Birmingham’s landmark Selfridges building. Not everybody liked it. Kaplický takes such criticism in stride.

“I want to be positive. It’s very easy to be negative. It’s always easy to trash something,” he said in a March 12 telephone interview from London. “I’m sure there were revolutions when they built St. Nicholas Church as well.”

In a 2004 interview with Radio Prague, Kaplický defended Selfridges in a similar fashion: “I’m sure the Parthenon was hated by a few characters, and so was the cathedral in Canterbury. The Empire State Building wasn’t loved, and now it is popular culture.”

The library could be finished as early as 2011 and is estimated to cost 2 billion Kč ($93.2 million). The five-story, 35,000-square-meter (376,737-square-foot) building will house 10 million volumes, of which 300,000 will be accessible to the public. The books will be stored in total darkness and a special robot will retrieve them upon request.

“The access to the volumes will be immediate; the readers could get them in three to five minutes after placing the order,” said Wolf Tochtermann of the International Union of Architects as he introduced the winning model.

In the Klementinum, it takes almost three hours to get a requested book, and, if a reader requests one that’s stored in the Hostivař facility, it takes a full day.

The “Eye above the City,” as Kaplický calls his project, will also have a restaurant, cafés, a bookstore, a gallery, an observation deck, a lecture room and an underground garage. Wireless Internet will be available throughout.

Kaplický said he wants the library to function as more of a community center than a traditional book warehouse. “A library can be isolated and you want to make it more public … to attract people who don’t read,” he said. It would be a place to have a date or go to a lecture, he added.

Models of the eight final designs considered for the library will be on display March 24–April 29 in the Klementium’s gallery.

This isn’t the first attempt to build a new library. The Czechoslovak government planned to build a new library in Karlín in the 1960s but never did, Reflex magazine reported in 2004. Instead, the government renamed the Klementinum the National Library. The Klementinum had been a Jesuit college before Empress Marie Theresa acquired the complex in the 18th century.

A top priority
When the current director of the National Library, Vlastimil Ježek, was appointed in 2004, building a new library and increasing public outreach were among his top priorities. So far, he seems to have succeeded.

“I want this place to be able to sell its services and things it can do well,” he told journalists at the time. “The public still considers libraries as more or less for the storage of books and manuscripts with no other significance.”

To back up these pledges, the library launched a project called Adopt a Manuscript in 2005 to display its most valuable prints and promote Czech literature. The Klementinum collections contain more than 10,000 manuscripts and 250,000 prints. To improve outreach, all l,450 employees study a foreign language, mostly English.

Despite full stacks in the depositories, the Klementinum also tirelessly tries to acquire precious prints, something that will continue when the new library opens. The library bought Johann Gutenberg’s indulgence scroll in 2005, and spent 9 million Kč on a fragment of a Latin translation of Dalimil’s Chronicle, one of the most significant texts in Czech history.

The most publicized event of 2007 will be the exhibition of the Devil’s Bible (or Codex Gigas) in September. Considered an eighth wonder of medieval times, the manuscript has been kept at the Swedish Royal Library in Stockholm since the end of the Thirty Years’ War.

The writers can be reached at news@praguepost.com

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