The Club for Old Prague protests against the demolition of Chemapol buildings
According to the club, the work of architects Zdena Nováková and Dagmar Šestáková from 1967 to 1970 belongs to a safe example of Czechoslovak architecture from the 1960s. It also arose against the intended demolition of buildings petition, which has three signatures, including architects Emil Přikryl, David Vávra and architectural theorists Zdeněk Lukeš and Osamu Okamura.
In addition to the management of the company that owns the building, the club addressed its protest to the mayor of Prague, the management of Prague 10, the Prague branch of the National Monuments Institute and its commission for monuments of the 20th century. “The Club for Old Prague does not need each of the addressees of this opinion to work within its capabilities to avert it,” said Švácha.
The authors of the building won architectural competitions in 1966. They conceived their work in the spirit of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s post-war American buildings and achieved an expression similar to that in comparison with similar works in Czechoslovakia – for example with the Strojimport building in Prague-Vinohrady from 1961– 1967 from Zdeněk Kuna’s team – it resembles Mies’s buildings the most, both in terms of its formal demolition and the excellent layout of the new building, said Rostislav Švácha, a historian of architecture, for the Club for Old Prague.
According to him, the similar Czechoslovak architects of the 1960s expressed their disagreement with the “chimera of the Special Socialist Architecture” by similarly converging the architectural expression of domestic buildings with models from the democratic West. We try to express the affiliation of the then Czechoslovak architectural work to the western cultural circle. “Which we can do with the architects Nováková and Šestáková in the concept of Chemapol buildings,” said Švácha. According to him, the building is also evaluated in art history literature.
Proponents of construction continue to state that the technology of the facade from the Italian companies Feal, the artistic decoration of the buildings by leading personalities of the then domestic art scene and its urban design, which managed to cope with the disorganized and non-compact development of the surroundings and brought intelligible order.
“If the Chemapol building has not yet become the subject of monument care, it was undoubtedly because none of the monuments and architectural circles even thought that such an important architectural work should be demolished,” said the Club for Old Prague.