Festival site Petřín

Academy of Fine Arts, Prague

Project idea

To look forward to the festival all year long, and finally come to enjoy it in all its lights, noise and transience. I want to fulfill the longing for gathering, the cult of pilgrimage, maypole cutting, celebration and childhood memories. I have no need to moralize visitors with architecture during an extraordinary once-a-year experience. The festival grounds want nothing more than a more consistently designed pilgrimage. I design architecture so visually intense that it feeds the audience, not the audience the architecture. It is a phenomenal experience to walk through the enfilade of the site, where the individually composed pavilions are gradually revealed and enveloped. Together they create a myriad of framable views. The axis is asymmetrically topped by two landmarks, the amphitheatre and the theatre. The architecture stands in strong contrast to the permanent layer, the sculptural concrete plinths, and the ephemeral layer, the colourful metal "sheds". By thematizing the kitsch of the festival, I am going against the plastered posters or the cigarette vending machine.

Project description

The festival area is composed in an axis accompanying the bastion wall. The individual pavilions co-create one central dispersal area of cultural activity. I propose a partial unveiling of the now almost invisible bastion wall to become one of the backdrops of the main axis. In contrast, I distance myself from the neighbouring student halls of residence by means of a dense forest. The student dormitories completely ignore the urbanism of the bastions, so I consider it right to immerse them in their own world and return the wall to its glory.
The enfilade of the festival curves slightly to achieve richer than linear vistas. The axis begins with the amphitheatre, sealed into the heart of the bastion wall. The auditorium of the amphitheatre also serves as the main access staircase to the site. By connecting to the existing pathways, it allows passersby a glimpse into the festival's storyline. The corner of the amphitheater exposes the wall the most, and therefore the terrain rises slightly towards the opposite landmark theater. This perspective trick reinforces the effect of the gradual unveiling of the pavilions.

The axis is hierarchized into three nameable spaces, the plazas. Between them, each of the three pavilions always creates an authentic space. Each plaza is punctuated by an iconic fountain between three trees. Highly branched acacia trees frame the area with a natural roof. Inside the grounds, the acacia trees look more like a colonnade. The central plaza is dominated by a large information board/screen that acts as a kind of bolt between the two landmarks, tilting the axis in two halves.
However, the back side, which might appear to be the grey part of the design, is always exposed to the several access routes into the area. I compose the pavilions so that their concave side faces the plaza and the convex side is always directed towards one of the six non-hierarchical paths. Thus, no side remains without the viewer's attention. I find fascination in the wild entry into the territory from the dense "bush" into the formal backdrop of the festival's architecture. Here I retain all the original deciduous trees, which I continue to add to and thicken.

Technical information

Architecture is based on a strong contrast between heavy/permanent and light/temporal architecture. The heavy comes out of the bastion wall, translating into the grey clay surface, from which the concrete plinths of the pavilions subsequently grow. The whole layer is meant to be sculptural by constantly subtracting or adding masses of concrete brick or earth. The layer has the ambition to remain a perpetual intervention in the wall and the terrain. To become romantically abandoned ruins or menhirs until the metal pavilions are one day blown away by the wind.
In contrast, sheet metal architecture is designed to be ephemeral for, say, a decade. It appeals to a strong sheet metal aesthetic and composability. Prefabrication not only creates a rich expression of bolts and rivets but is disassembled for another site or function. As I design spaces for several different events, the pavilions function as empty boxes for variable use. Significant is their contrasting colour scheme of red, yellow, turquoise, white and black, which draws on the colour scheme of iconic billboards from Las Vegas or Czech folk costumes, i.e. a mostly white base festooned with such fun embellishments.

Integration of art
The artistic intervention touches on the concrete plinths under each pavilion and the design of the two water features. We anticipate that this part of the project will endure over time after the demise of our proposed feature. They will thus become a fossil reminder while subsequently offering space for new free use. The falconry is distinctively sculptural in the form of a tangle of serpentine braids. The inspiration came from both the external carnival aesthetic and the internal motif of disrupting a clearly defined geometric composition with amorphous shapes. These "honeycomb" shapes seemed to parasitically disturb the simplicity that is familiar and familiar to us. It also creates an opportunity for an interactive encounter with architecture, where individual shapes can serve as benches or play elements.
The stacked concrete plinths are designed as prefabricated so that the whole form appears coherent and there is no material separation between the sculptures and the staircases. The individual plinths will be divided into 4 - 6 parts by an expansion joint.

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