House No. 515 on Kampa, sometimes known as the Pinkas Palace, is one of the few solitaires of its kind to be found in the context of Prague’s Mala Strana. Despite its outward appearance as a neatly planned palace architecture, inside it is a rich confluence of several original buildings, gradually transformed over time until recent times. This authentic structure, situated in an exceptional location close to the Royal Route, has been damaged, like many other houses in the centre of Prague, by arbitrary alterations to individual residential units and by insensitive renovation in the 1980s.
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Location
- Prague 1, Na Kampě č.p. 515/8
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Realization
- 2014 - 2022
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Project works
- 2013 - 2020
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Cooperation on projects
- Marek Tichý
- Magdalena Kurfürstová
- Lukáš Soukup
The largest, visually noticeable alteration to the house is the roofing of the courtyard and the associated infill of the pavilions. The roofing is designed as glass panels with a supporting structure of subtle metal profiles and with the centre plotted by cables anchored to the vertical support structures.The glazing of the arcades is is only suspended on profiles placed between the trusses of the trusses and only attached to the arcades at points, which are reconstructed in the spirit of their classical form, with the addition of cast-iron railings and modifications to the ground layer.
During its existence, the Pinkas Palace has changed many functions and forms. The reconstruction refers to the state at the beginning of the 19th century, when the house was rebuilt in its present form and acquired a purely residential function. On the second and third floors there were luxurious spacious apartments, and on the ground floor there were smaller flats of a lower standard. Due to the exclusivity and location of the building and its historical value today, the building after reconstruction contains mostly larger residential apartments respecting the original structure of the building.
Although the classical layout of the house was well preserved and was not fundamentally damaged even by the post-war splitting of the originally large flats on the floors into smaller flats, most of the arts and crafts elements (doors, floors, windows) have disappeared over time and the historical character of the interiors has therefore been considerably hidden. The restoration of the building therefore respected the classical layout, removing modern to recent infill elements and replacing them with period copies. On the ground floor of the south wing, the Baroque spatial layout of the vaulted hall was rehabilitated.
