Mateo Arquitectura

Connecting Hall, Main Entrance of the national Gallery and access between the palaces Slam and Schwarzenberg International Competition, First Award. 2004

After winning the Restricted Competition in 2004 the construction of the new central access to the National Gallery in Prague began in late 2009 and works are ongoing, it will be completed by the end of this year.

Author: Josep Lluís Mateo

Client: National Gallery of Czech Republic

Site: Salm Palace, Hradcanske Square, Prague

Project: 2004 - works 2009-2011

Surface: 1.500 m2

Budget: 3.500.000 euros

1. Contextual conditions

The Court as a secret garden

The sequence of courts organized by the sum of the palaces Salm, Schwarzenberg and the small wing house builds a most beautiful urban front toward the plaza of access to the Castle.

Those are courts of diverse qualities:

- open to the street and the representation of the access in the case of Salm Palace;

- closed but with a certain monumentality in the case of the Schwartzenber Palace,

- and hidden by the wall, naturalistic: with herb and a great tree, intimate in our case.

We wish to consolidate this space by using the atmosphere of a secret garden.

The court is limited by the old facades. Our construction should continue using them like limits of the space.

2. Space between Earth and Sky

(building the floor and roof)

If the vertical limits already exist, our intervention will suppose to work with the horizontal limits of the space: the floor -the superficial layer of the earth- and the ceiling, the border that separates us with the

sky.

The space is the gaseous fluid that moves among these limits.

The floor is a topography that moves subtly to facilitate the access to the two neighboring palaces, hard, but also partially natural, organic: plants, land, water materialize it.

The ceiling is built with a metallic structure with most minimum and precise encounters in the edges. It is an organic sheet: upper gravel.

3. The secret garden

The roof, the court that collects the water and the green limits toward the Schwarzenberg Palace highlight the organic life in the place in not an evident way.

Preserving the existing wall without almost any intervention has seemed fundamental to insist in this argument.

4. Floating Space

The interior space, built by the central beam is open, flexible, multiple and complex, and both light, nearly provisional. With other tectonics, it could nearly be a light campaign tent placed in the middle of an existing nature. In this case, it is permanent but fragile and available.

5. Structural concept

The structure of the National Gallery of Prague access roof is composed by three longitudinal frames and nine secondary orthogonal beams. Each Main frame has two steel columns. The two ends are supported by the existing façades.

These three frames are solved in a different way, depending of their location in plan.