CAMP Moves Into a 1915 Engineering Hall in Karlín for At Least Three Years

The Centre for Architecture and Metropolitan Planning has somewhere to go. From November, CAMP is at Pobřežní 20a in Karlín, in a hall built in 1915 for the Havelka & Mész engineering works, and it will stay there for at least three years while the Prager Cubes at Emauzy — its home and the planning institute's — are reconstructed.

The centre published the move itself, with a history of the building and a note on what the relocation costs its team.

It is definitely a combination of high expectations and impossible deadlines. We are doing everything so that the temporary space does not disappoint visitors, so that they feel good in it and find in it everything CAMP used to offer at Emauzy. We don't want it to feel like a stopgap — after all, we will be operating here for at least three years and the bar is set high. At the same time we wanted to open as soon as possible: you can only operate in nomad mode for a very limited time. I hope everyone will like it in Karlín.

— Štěpán Bärtl, head of CAMP

A hall that has been four different factories

The plot at Pobřežní carried a long wooden building as early as the 1840s, probably a dye-works. The first engineering plant went up on the land in 1861, and was taken over by Havelka & Mész, which made sugar-refinery machinery and equipment for laundries and ironing rooms — its washing machines sold under the Perun brand, and period catalogues also list fire pumps. The firm extended and rebuilt the complex repeatedly; the hall CAMP will occupy dates, according to the available plans, from 1915, and the alterations to the site were designed by Oldřich Brabec.

Nationalisation followed in 1946, the owners' names left the company name, and the plant traded simply as Perun n.p. By 1953 the site was part of ČKD; washing-machine production went to Trnava and ČKD Dukla turned to heavy engineering, making boilers for power plants.

In the later 1990s the former ČKD site was to become the Negrelli centre, an office and retail scheme by the architect Jiří Kripner of Atelier A.I.T. Demolishing a substation and an adjoining single-storey building with a saddle roof freed the ground for today's car park, which cut the complex in two. The eastern part with the original hall was used briefly by DHL as a parcel store, with an administrative building added, and later opened to the public as a gallery — visitors may know it as Hauch or LL Gallery.

What CAMP will and will not do to it

The space needs adapting, but the centre describes itself as entering an existing gallery as one more temporary layer, with interventions that are mostly local and reversible. For an institution whose subject is how buildings are altered, that is the more interesting line in the announcement than the address: a three-year tenancy treated as something to be undone afterwards rather than fitted out as if permanent.

The first exhibition in Karlín is called All You Can Read, on how ideas from books about architecture, urbanism and city development reach actual practice. The exhibition hall will work as a reading room, opening up the collection of professional literature CAMP has been building systematically in the nine years since it was founded — several hundred Czech and foreign titles to leaf through, plus a curated selection of books and ideas that might inform how Prague develops.

Pobřežní has no shore

The street name is a century out of date, and the reason is the biggest piece of civil engineering in Karlín's history. A hundred years ago the northern side of Pobřežní really was the bank of an arm of the Vltava. Mills used the water and the busy Karlín port sent ships as far as Hamburg. The river, threading between several islands, also flooded regularly, and in 1924 a large project to regulate its channel began: the Vltava was moved several hundred metres towards Holešovice and its course through the city shortened by more than a kilometre.

Spoil from the excavations went into the old channel, more infill followed, and by the 1950s the water had gone from Pobřežní for good. Prague lost the Rohanský, Korunní, Primátorský and Jerusalemský islands, whose area joined Karlín; of the original cluster only Štvanice survives. The water came back once, in 2002, when it reached these streets and damaged the structural stability of some buildings — which is why the investment since has gone not only into walls and embankments but into retention basins and flood gates in the sewer network.

CAMP will spend three years explaining Prague's development from inside a building that stands on a river bed.