The Dejvice Campus is located in an attractive location in the wider centre of Prague and is home to important educational, scientific and cultural institutions. It has the potential to become a truly vibrant university campus connected to the city and the everyday life of its residents.
The idea of joint development of the Dejvice Campus is not new; it was already confirmed in 2015 by a memorandum signed by the Czech Technical University, Charles University, the Institute of Chemical Technology, the Institute of Biomedical Research of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and Prague 6. In recent years, the public space of the campus has been successfully activated by a cultural and community programme, for example through the Vektor Technická event. The project in Kolejní Street now takes this logic further. It tests how public space can function for everyday movement, sports, games and meetings.
Kolejní Street has so far been used mainly as a parking lot. Frederik Daňko, Sára Kročková and Albert Kulík from the Valouch–Stibral–Semerák studio decided to reevaluate its functioning through the principles of tactical urbanism, an approach that uses temporary, quick and relatively low-cost interventions to verify possible long-term changes in public space.
After the removal of parked cars, a place was created for table tennis, basketball, football and skate elements. The usual traffic space became an improvised urban playground, a space for movement, short stops and informal meetings of students, passers-by and the wider public.
The project also shows that the transformation of a campus does not have to start with large investments, but can also grow from student initiatives and small experiments that verify new possibilities for using urban space in practice.
As part of the international student workshop FA around the corner, new trees are also being planted in front of the entrance to the faculty according to the design of the students from the Jeníková–Štemberová–Trpkoš studio.
In addition to the transformed Kolejní, the semester exhibition of studio work will offer the work of almost seventy architecture and urbanism studios, landscape architecture and design. Up to 1,500 exhibited projects are dedicated to the topics of the renewal of defunct settlements, social housing, conversions of existing buildings or the use of brownfields.
FAZÓNA – the semester exhibition of studio work of the Faculty of Architecture of the Czech Technical University – is open from May 26 to June 26 daily from 9:00 to 18:00. Admission is free and barrier-free. The projects of the students of the Faculty of Architecture of the Czech Technical University will also be available to view online; the first-year students have their own web gallery.