Date: 2025
Architects: Frank Barkow, Regine Leibinger
Competition: 2nd Place, 12/2024 - 09/2025
Team: Sven Bauer, Tim Berge, Nick Boer, Sven Hecht (Team Leader), Annabelle Lichtl, Maria Matsouki, Zofia Patyna (Workshop), Sophia Raucci, Adin Rimland, Francesca Robustelli, Bogdan Strugar (Team Leader)
Location: Prague, Czech Republic
Size: 20,800 qm | 224,000 sq ft
Structural Engineer: Buro Happold, Berlin
Renderings: Fillipo Bolognese, Milan, Italy
Role: Adin Rimland was a Project Architect for this project while working at Barkow Leibinger. His role included design development, material research, and coordination with collaborators and fabricators. The project is hosted on Barkow Leibinger’s website — please visit the official page for full documentation: https://barkowleibinger.com/en/projects/florenc21-prag-competition
Image Courtesy of Barkow Leibinger
The design establishes a cohesive and distinctive architectural identity that is deeply rooted in Prague’s cultural and architectural identity, while integrating the block seamlessly into its context. The organization enable path/ throughways permeably that will help connect it to the neighbourhood. The block is compact and divided by the flyover highway into two volumes that are in visual and geometric dialogue, unified by a continuous, spatially open ground floor – a canopy-covered urban market (shops, cafes, lobbies and entrances) that grounds the entire ensemble and links it to the street. With their stepped profiles, the two buildings respond to the surrounding city heights, capped by a small-scale green roofscapes. Façade typologies were developed in response to Prague’s historic cityscape to further embed it into context.
Two typologies articulate the ensemble: the outboard facades facing the Old Town, a gritted frame façade referencing Czech Cubism, reinterpreted here as a performative layered facade with integrated external sun protection. The second façade faces inboard to the flyover and is characterized by winter garden/ balconies and glazing at the vertical lobby tower anticipating the street becoming more pedestrian friendly and neighbourly.
