The City Has Picked the Architects for a Thousand Rental Flats at Nové Dvory

Prague's own developer has settled who will draw the first housing blocks at Nové Dvory. Pražská developerská společnost, the city magistrate's in-house organisation for housing projects, announced the winners of two architectural competitions for the quarter it intends to build around the future metro D station: re:architekti took one, Apropos Architects the other. Together the blocks are to carry roughly a thousand flats. The press release went out on 17 September and ČTK carried the result on 18 September, quoting the company's media representative Markéta Miková.

The arithmetic in the two sources does not line up neatly and is worth stating plainly. The press release describes two competitions, numbered Nové Dvory 5 and Nové Dvory 6. ČTK counts three blocks around the station, one designed by re:architekti and two by Apropos Architects. Read together, the second competition covers more than one block.

What the jury bought

The competitions were restricted ones, run under Czech procurement law and the Chamber of Architects' competition rules, with CCEA MOBA as organiser. Thirty studios qualified — fifteen for each — and proposals were due on 28 August. Every qualified entrant that submitted was paid 115,000 crowns, and each competition set aside roughly three million crowns for prizes and compensation. The jury sat in early September and judged the entries anonymously: independent architects with representatives of the city, of Prague 4 and of PDS, and specialists in transport, economics, energy and landscape architecture. The chair was the architect Šimon Vojtík.

In the end what decided it for both winners was above all the ability to combine a strong architectural concept with a rational solution appropriate to municipal rental housing.

— Šimon Vojtík, chair of the jury

The jury's reading of the re:architekti block is that it answers two things at once: the panel housing estate next door and the planned centre of Nové Dvory, working with corners, changes of height, gardens and views to produce a range of living conditions rather than one. Apropos Architects were credited with alternating taller and lower sections so that the development reads at several scales, and with a courtyard that combines a through route on foot, publicly accessible pieces and a quieter residential part.

Petr Urbánek, the director of PDS, tied both back to the territorial study the magistrate had drawn up for the area.

They fulfil what is the basis of the Nové Dvory urban study, that is, they have a legible block structure, a lively ground floor around the future metro D station and a connection to public spaces. All of that makes a full-fledged city quarter, one that will be good to live in.

— Petr Urbánek, director of Pražská developerská společnost

The two buildings on top of the station

Separately from the competitions, PDS is preparing the projects for two buildings that will stand directly above the metro station itself, on the corner of Durychova and Libušská. Besides the entrances to the metro, the city intends to put housing, civic amenities, offices and a social and cultural hall inside them.

That is the part that will decide whether this works as a piece of city rather than as a housing estate with a station under it. A block with a lively ground floor is easy to draw and hard to let; a building that contains the metro entrance has a reason for people to walk through it every day.

The dates do not match the drawings

Nové Dvory station is part of metro D, which will link Náměstí Míru with Písnice and whose construction started in 2022. On the current schedule the line should begin running between Pankrác and Nové Dvory in the second half of 2032, with automatic trains; the city also plans, further out, to extend it from Náměstí Míru to Náměstí Republiky.

So the architects have been chosen for blocks whose central argument — a metro station at the doorstep — is six years away. PDS will now open a negotiated procedure without publication with the two winners and sign contracts for the project documentation. On a city timetable that is not premature: design documentation, permits and procurement will use most of the interval. It does mean the first residents of municipal rental flats at Nové Dvory may arrive before the trains do.