Josef Kučera↓

About the work

Holešovice Island

Josef Kučera’s project envisions an urban building, or rather a building complex, at the foot of Most Barikádníků (Barricaders’ Bridge) on the outskirts of Holešovice. The basic idea behind the project, which had to contend with a complicated peripheral parcel of land, is multifunctionality: workshops, housing, offices, and a petrol station in front of one of the buildings. It is an island on the edge of the urban fabric, cut off from the rest of the city by transportation infrastructure and bordered by the Vltava River. The entire complex has been designed as a distinctive unit, internally interconnected by a working street that links all of the project’s operations. The individual buildings communicate with the busy road, the railway bridge, and the riverfront park. Kučera has laid out the buildings on the pre-existing grid, thus ensuring an economy of design (enabling the use of prefabricated materials) and integrating the individual functions into a logical and flexible system.

In his work, Josef Kučera has long focused on craftsmanship, so the inclusion of workshops is very close to his heart. The project’s various operations have thus been designed on the basis of his prior experience with this type of functionality. The search for a simple architectural language – something that characterizes the project as a whole – is also a frequent theme in Kučera’s work.