National Library of the Czeck Republic
Location: Prague, Czech Republic
International Design Competition, 2006

The 500,000 sq ft building is positioned on the Letenska Plain, a bluff above the Old Town with comanding views of the Prague Castle and the adjacent region.  The challenge was to seamlessly incorporate private management offices and storage of valuable archived collections with a general reference library, restaurant and lecture hall all into one public building. 
Transparency, accessibility and exchange are the key conceptual armatures that informed the development of the project, derived from the various and important ideals of democracy and the sharing of knowledge. The act of seeking and acquiring knowledge is not a linear path but instead a cognitive and collective conglomeration of information that is layered and interconnected.  With the ease of the internet, global markets and jet travel boundaries both disintegrate and stiffen as they compile upon each other.  The new National Library for the Czech Republic transforms this oscillating framework into an organized spatial experience.

The building skin takes a common building material and slightly modifies its application in effort to create a completelly new texture/experience.  Here ceramic frit is burned on the the glass skin in gradiated densities to provide varying levels of opacity.  This gradation emphasizes our motivation in this project to explore blurred/oscillating boundaries found in the sharing of knowledge, the contradictions in the proposed brief and our research in the history of Czechoslovakia itself.  The seamless transition of differing light qualities stiches together dissimlar experiences.  The abundance of diferent uses in this building are melded together as the skin becomes more opaque where internal functions require high UV resistance, and gradually more clear where sunlight is desirable.