Prague Castle Will Compete the Stájový Dvůr This Winter, Picking Up an Unfinished 1990s Idea

Prague Castle will hold an architectural competition to turn the Stájový dvůr into a visitor and information centre. The Castle Administration's spokesperson, Natálie Máchová, gave the timing to journalists on 2 September, during a tour of buildings associated with Václav Havel:

We will be announcing an architectural competition in the winter months this year or at the start of next year for the transformation of the Stájový dvůr, probably into a visitor centre.

— Natálie Máchová, spokesperson for the Prague Castle Administration

The courtyard is originally Renaissance and stands behind the wall of U Prašného mostu, opposite the Castle Riding School. It is one of the few substantial pieces of the castle complex on the northern approach that has never been given a settled public use, which is what has kept it in play for thirty-five years.

An idea that predates the competition by three decades

The architect and architectural historian Zdeněk Lukeš, who has worked at the Castle since Havel's time, said that when the complex was opened up after Havel's election as Czechoslovak president at the end of 1989, various notions about the use of the Stájový dvůr were in circulation. None was carried out.

Under Petr Pavel, I think, there is intensive work going on to make something there for people. I think they are trying to pick up on some of the ideas we had in the 1990s.

— Zdeněk Lukeš, architect and architectural historian

That is the frame the competition arrives in, and it is worth being precise about what did and did not get built in the earlier round. Two large works are associated with the Havel era: Josef Pleskot's tunnel under Prašný most in the Stag Moat, and Eva Jiřičná's Orangery. New paving was laid on Jiřské náměstí inside the Castle, to a historic pattern. A large international competition for the Castle's northern forecourt, by contrast, did not produce a realisable result — a caution worth noting as another competition is prepared for a site a few hundred metres away.

Other ideas were talked out of the president by his architects. Havel, from whose birth ninety years will have passed on 5 October, proposed building a student hall of residence in the Lumbe Garden with a retirement home beside it; in the architects' experience such close cohabitation of the young and the old tends to be problematic. His notion of a European village of houses for individual countries also came to nothing.

The footbridge question is back too

Last year's landscape architects' competition for the Chotkovy sady reckoned with the possibility of a path leading from the Stag Moat directly into the gardens. It also reopened the subject of a new footbridge over the moat.

Plečnik already thought that up, that you could make a footbridge for pedestrians that would connect the two hills, that is the St Wenceslas vineyard, Opyš and the area in the Chotkovy sady. That is being considered again today.

— Zdeněk Lukeš, architect and architectural historian

The same problem defeated the 1990s attempt to open the lower Stag Moat. If the gate were opened, Lukeš said, pedestrians would find themselves in a difficult position, because Chotkova street has no pavements. A tunnel or another footbridge was considered and ran into obstacles. In the end, Lukeš said, his own solution was to lead people out on footbridges alongside the Chotkova road to Klárov; Pleskot built them, and in his view they work to this day.

Whoever enters the Stájový dvůr competition will, according to Lukeš, probably have to deal with the problem of a possible disturbance of the castle panorama. On a site inside the castle precinct, on the ridge, that is not a small constraint — and it is the one that has quietly decided the fate of most proposals here since 1989.

Access to the wider complex has moved with each presidency: the Royal Garden was opened after Havel took office, having refused to live in the presidential house used by Gustáv Husák, and the cathedral's main tower, closed under Husák so that the house could not be seen from it, was reopened. Havel's successors Václav Klaus and Miloš Zeman restricted entry to the Royal Garden sharply, and a fence went up in it; under Pavel the fence has gone and the garden is accessible.