Sitting open for years, on two main axes, one connecting the site to the centrum, this city owned parcel posed a number of engineering and logistical challenges. It was bordered on two sides by the Olšany Cemeteries where Franz Kafak is buried. The first was anchoring the 4-story retaining wall into the cemetery ground that was required to build the underground parking. The second was connecting to the underground metro for entrance to the new building and a way to the street.
In 1999, the City of Prague and the developer Africa-Israel sponsored a competition for a mixed-use retail center for the site in Prague 3, Vinohrady. It was won by a local Czech architect, Petr Franta, who at the time, was a returning citizen with a small office and no experience in large mixed-use modern buildings. The assignment was turning the competition scheme into a buildable project with a set of documents that could be bid and contracted properly without risking significant overruns; and then building it in this complicated condition.
To do so required managing and teaching a small group of architects and engineers with no experience in a project with an extensive scope that called for a sophisticated retail layout, a complex curtain wall and skylight system, mechanical, electrical, plumbing and emergency systems to serve a public facility with numerous entrances and circulation requirements. To coordinate and connect the metro, underground parking, and offices above in a cost-effective structural design on a site that was an engineering problem due to the constraints of the metro and cemetery on three sides was 'dramatic' at times - and fortunately successful.
”Palác Flóra officially opened on March 20, 2003 but the entire building was turned over in November 2003 — four years of intensively hard work, starting with a competition scheme, paid off. It remains one of the most successful mall buildings in the Czech Republic and became an anchor in the development of Prague 3 - a robust place to live and work today. A dear friend, a traffic engineer who worked on the Holešovice Port, lives two metro stops away.
