Chybík + Krištof Will Draw the Ground Around Nádraží Holešovice

The competition for what gets built around the Nádraží Holešovice metro station has been won by the Brno studio Chybík + Krištof. Tomáš Králíček, the media representative for the project, told ČTK the result on 16 September. The competition was called in March by Nové Holešovice, the joint company formed by Prague's transport undertaking DPP and private developers, and it covered the plots around the station north of Plynární street.

The jury chair, the urbanist Jörn Walter, named three things in the winning entry that he said would give the place an identity.

The arched halls create a legible connection between train, metro, buses and trams. The inventive use of the space along the railway viaduct for commercial and cultural functions ensures that no neglected back side of the area appears here. The third distinct element is the rotated high-rise building, which will create a recognisable landmark.

— Jörn Walter, chair of the competition jury

Ondřej Chybík and Michal Krištof said they had built the scheme on joining the existing transport infrastructure to new places for ordinary daily life.

Our proposal therefore combines two apparently contradictory qualities of a district: it keeps the fast and intuitive transfer between train, metro and tram, but at the same time it creates a square with the character of a destination, so that people have a reason to stay in the place.

— Ondřej Chybík and Michal Krištof

How it was judged

Eight teams entered on the organisers' invitation and five went through to the second round. In that round the finalists developed their entries further on architecture, on the transport solution and on economic feasibility, and worked the conclusions of expert assessments into them. That is a longer leash than most Czech competitions give, and it is the reason the result arrives with a transport answer attached rather than a picture alone.

Prague 7, which published the result on its own site on 17 September, names the rest of the podium: ADEPT came second and Behnisch Architekten third. The district also gives Jörn Walter's standing — he is the former chief building director of Hamburg.

All the entries go on public show from 5 October, when the exhibition opens at the Prague 7 town hall on U Průhonu; the district says it will also be shown in the northern vestibule of the Nádraží Holešovice metro station, which is the one place the people it concerns pass through anyway.

Prague Morning puts the area at roughly eight hectares and describes the winning scheme as bringing two new public squares and a high-rise landmark to a site that has until now been read as transport infrastructure with a brownfield attached.

Who is actually building it

The design is the newest part of this story and the least contested. DPP founded Nové Holešovice in 2021 with the developer Karlín Group; CPI Property Group, which owns land nearby, joined afterwards. Then came several years of political argument over the sale of the city's own plots into the venture, which the city leadership approved only last May.

The shareholders have changed underneath the argument. J&T first bought half of CPI's stake, and Karlín Group's share was then bought out by EP Real Estate, which belongs to Daniel Křetínský's EPH. Prague Morning names a wider field around the project — CPI Property, EP Real Estate, Penta Real Estate and AKIPIA, alongside the City of Prague and the Prague 7 district. ČTK's account of the venture itself names only DPP, CPI Property Group and EP Real Estate, and we have not been able to reconcile the two lists from the sources at hand.

That history is worth holding beside the drawing. Nádraží Holešovice is one of the few places in Prague where a metro station, a railway station, trams and buses already meet on ground that is mostly empty, and the reason it has stayed empty for so long is ownership rather than design. A competition result settles what the halls and the tower should look like. It does not settle the thing that has held the site up, which is who owns which parcel and on what terms — and that part, on the sources' own account, took several years of political argument and a city vote last May to get even this far.