We fight each other. Prague wants to destroy Vyšehrad
The planned railway bridge over the Vltava would take a lot from the Czech Republic – and offer nothing in return. Except for the aesthetics of the East European station buffet from the seventies.
It slowly becomes a story of eternal repetition. Every year in the fall, flocks of birds fly south to return to their nesting grounds in the spring. Every year the leaves fall from the trees to become green again. Every year at this time, chain stores turn on thousands of lights to attract thousands of citizens willing to go into debt for gifts for their fellow man. And every year there is at least one big investor, regardless of whether it is state, semi-state, or private, to demolish or at least “improve” the building we were used to and replace it with another, big – and ugly – building.
The clear winner this fall was the Railway Administration. For the fact that she decided to finally deal with the nameless bridge under Vyšehrad, which has become part of the view of this memorable location in today’s Prague. And replace it with the most new one, completely inappropriate for a number of reasons.
Bhavachakra
People from the Railway Administration apparently counted on the fact that only a few hopeless romantics would oppose the plan, who would soon be convicted of radical conservatism, and thus the elimination of the inconvenient bridge would cost nothing in the way. But because our the bhavachakra it goes round and round, but it’s not exactly the same, this autumn still brought a pleasant change. This is an unusually sharp reaction of leading Czech architects, who certainly cannot be considered old-timers.
Several prominent personalities, who have behind them significant realizations precisely in the environment of Prague and other historical cities, expressed their dissatisfaction with the intended form of the new bridge. And even with the very fact that the old one should be destroyed.
How to explain it? We think about it first, if we come by destroying the old bridge, which was deliberately brought to a critical state. At first glance, almost nothing. Amateur supporters of modernity will explain to us at all costs that it was planned from the beginning as a purely functional building with a limited lifespan. They will be right: yes, no building is built forever. He further explains that this bridge has been here for a long time, a little over a hundred years, while the real monument is the ancient Vyšehrad. At first glance, this may seem convincing. But it’s not true.
Temple, tunnel and bridge
Vyšehrad is not an easy thing. It’s not just a rock and a set of buildings on top of it. It is also a conglomerate of ideas that bind to this material base and form an indivisible whole with it. It is not enough to say that it is the ancient residence of the Přemysl princes, a sacred precinct with its own chapter and a group of churches, a baroque citadel, and finally a national cemetery and the second most prominent Prague landmark after Prague Castle.
Vyšehrad, as we perceive it today, is the result of the purposeful efforts of several generations of our ancestors who lived in the second half of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Then, in a short period of time, buildings were created here, which as a whole represent several interpretations of Vyšehrad and its place in history.
At the same time, in close proximity or directly in the Vyšehrad rock, transport structures were built, which belong to the development of the landscape and the city. The Vyšehrad tunnel, the existing railway bridge and the towers of the main Vyšehrad church were completed in the first years of the last century. In a time that on the one hand strove for modernity, and on the other remained firmly anchored in the past. Whether mythical, literary or “real”.
The railway bridge is together with the Vyšehrad Tunnel, the Basilica of St. Peter and Paul and Slavín a visual monument of the Czech national upheaval of the 19th century, which we may not always be aware of, but subliminally I perceive it that way. The design of the new bridge destroys this unique whole, but does not give us anything for it.
Although the new bridge retains pillars from the old structure and retains an arched silhouette, its design is so different from the current state that this partial continuity loses its meaning.
We are not like us
In the following debates, we will surely hear that it is possible to modify the project, change its color, and so on. Still, the very fact that a rambling proposal won, totally inappropriate for the location, says something. The intended boarding ramps or spaces to be placed under the viaduct on the shore look really desperate. It’s as if time has stopped here and we’ve returned somewhere to the 70s of the last century with an aesthetic worthy of a station buffet somewhere in Eastern Europe.
The attempt to destroy the Vyšehrad Bridge cannot be understood other than as an institutional failure of the Railway Administration and the capital city. Nothing changes the fact that the square and member of the evaluation jury Adam Scheinherr reacted to the negative feedback ex post statement, he distanced himself from the project. Completely in the spirit of the motto “we are not like us”or “we fight against each other”.
It should be added that representatives of the Club for Old Prague and the National Monument Institute also assisted in the selection. But no one stuck to the bridge, which is a cultural monument, and no one was hit – everything happened in Czech quietly and behind closed doors.
AGAINST statement on the selection of the winning proposal, which was published by the National Institute of Monuments, speaks of the “complexity of the issue” with official ptydepe. The planned destruction of the monument is excused in advance by stating that “the assignment itself together with the unsatisfactory condition of the steel arches made the repair of the historical structures difficult”. The winning proposal is said to be an acceptable compromise that only needs to be “further developed and refined”. The fact that there was even an option to replicate the most – before the Institute of Planning and Development rejected it – is passed over by preservationists practically without comment.
The age of irresponsibility
It is no coincidence that the blank statement of the National Monuments Institute regarding one of the most significant interventions in the panoramic views of the Prague Monument Reserve is not signed by anyone. Everything is covered up so that individual indecisiveness or incompetence is covered by an institutional banner, so that no one bears personal responsibility or has to burn their fingers.
Such a procedure is becoming an increasingly common practice that urgently calls for change. At a time when the authorities are forcing legal and natural persons to be as transparent as possible, it is absurd that citizens should not have the opportunity to control how people who have entrusted the state and self-government with the extensive national heritage – a monument fund that we did not create and that we have no right to preserve. There is no factual problem preventing those who are supposed to take care of it in their job description to publish their professional and binding opinions. And to do it non-anonymously. All the more so because it decides on even much greater values than just taxpayers’ money.
The author, art historian, is a professor at the Faculty of Architecture of the Czech Technical University.
Video: Archaeological find of the century – the mysterious church in Vyšehrad (January 30, 2015)
In Vyšehrad, archaeologists found the foundations of a structure that has no period in Central Europe. It is a church about which there are no written documents, although it had monumental dimensions. | Video: Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic