Prager's Cubes Come Apart Before They Go Back Together

The three glass boxes that Karel Prager and Jiří Kadeřábek set down beside the Emauzy monastery in 1973 are about to be taken apart. Not demolished — dismantled, item by item, with an inventory kept of what comes out. The reconstruction of the complex at Vyšehradská 51, home to the city's planning institute IPR and its public-facing gallery CAMP, began at the end of June and is scheduled to run three years at a cost of 1.4 billion crowns, funded by Prague City Hall.

The building has been waiting half a century

Prager's complex has never had a comprehensive renovation. What is being restored is not simply the fabric but the original architectural proposition: modern offices, exhibition halls, and — the part the city lost — publicly accessible terraces and a deliberate openness toward the street. Fifty years of ad-hoc adaptation buried most of that.

The design work is split across four teams. The reconstruction concept is led by Professor Miloslav Pavlík, who worked with Prager himself. A ČVUT expert team handles the envelope and building systems, IXA studio the spatial arrangement, and Land05 the landscape.

Taking a building apart is a design problem

The more unusual half of the project is procedural. Before anything came out, a pre-reconstruction audit by ČVUT mapped what the building contains that can be recovered: steel elements, concrete, brick, glass. The institute has partnered with Cyrkl, a Czech company that trades in reclaimed construction material, to find those components a second life rather than a skip.

"In the buildings, bare partitions and empty rooms will remain. Then comes the dismantling of the elements."

— Ondřej Boháč, director of IPR Praha

Recovered fittings are being offered onward to city institutions, non-profits and the public.

"The goal of circular reconstruction isn't merely minimising waste. We want to keep materials and equipment in circulation, and find new applications for them."

— Martina Škvorová, Cyrkl

The distinction matters. Construction and demolition waste is the largest waste stream in the country by mass, and the standard response — crushing concrete into road aggregate — is technically recycling while destroying most of the value. Keeping a steel frame as a steel frame is a different and much harder thing to organise, which is why almost nobody does it. That a public institution is attempting it on its own headquarters, at this scale, is the part of this project other clients will be watching.

Where CAMP goes meanwhile

The architecture centre closed its Vyšehradská home with a party on 25 June, capping a farewell programme titled Stavba povolena that ran through the month. It reopens in autumn at Pobřežní 20a in Karlín, in a former ship repair facility — a temporary address for the next three years, and a reasonably fitting one for an institution spending that time thinking about what buildings are made of.