Our mission
The project responds to the present situation in the construction industry, development activities, which with varying degrees of sensitivity and with new investments of various functions enter the already existing, very often historically valuable environment. The main objective of the project is to map in detail and evaluate architecturally and historically the new buildings in the historic environment of Czech towns, built after 1989, and on the basis of this critical reflection to create a comprehensible tool that will be a clear manual for conservation officers and all other branches of the state administration involved in the decision-making processes in construction, so that the cultural and historical values of the areas under construction are taken into account as much as possible.
The first major output will be a new methodology (complementary to the older one: Kuča, Kučová, Kibic, 2004), which will be based mainly on an area representative field survey of new buildings built after 1989 in the historical areas of the Czech Republic. The collected examples will be evaluated, with the main focus on the relationship of new buildings to the environment and its values. High quality examples will be selected from all the studied new buildings and typical situations will be selected from them. These will be analysed and, based on this analysis, the methodology will recommend procedures that will lead to good and acceptable conservation interventions in conservation areas, conservation zones and other areas of conservation value. Practices used in other European countries will also be studied and taken into account. Prior to the publication of the methodology, workshops with architects, conservationists and other interested professionals are planned to test the applicability of the proposed methodological procedures in practice.
The second key output of the project will be an exhibition, planned for the duration of the project in Prague and one other foreign location, and a critical catalogue, published in Czech and English, which will summarize the results of a survey of high quality architectural entrances to protected and other valuable sites from the last thirty years throughout the Czech Republic. It will provide analyses of about 120 new buildings accompanied by pictorial and planning documentation. These analyses will concentrate on the intentions of the architects who designed the selected new buildings, their conception of context and contextuality, and will assess the extent to which more general lessons can be drawn from the approach of these architects for the future practice of architecture and conservation. Other important topics of analysis will be the impact of new building on the wider environment of a given community, the social impact of this new building, and its usefulness to the local community from an aesthetic and ethical perspective. The introductory texts of the catalogue will place the debate on new architecture in the old environment in an international context, provide an account of the history of contextual architecture in the 20th century, and examine its types and trends over the last thirty years. A further output will be an international conference designed primarily to evaluate the project's outputs and compare them with the situation abroad. The reflection of contemporary architecture in historical environments in neighbouring Central European countries and the mapping of the contemporary European professional debate on this important topic will also be essential for the elaboration of the methodology, the exhibition and the critical catalogue.
Another output will be a possible revision of the values of surveyed areas. A new database application will be created for the mapping of new buildings, which will be linked to the Integrated information system of monument care (IISPP). Data on new buildings will also be displayed in an interactive map. In the heritage registration system, the data on new buildings will be useful not only for the methodology of their further construction, but also for facilitating their future evaluation as a heritage potential.
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