DUBAI: The national pavilion at the World Exposition Expo 2020 in Dubai will be built based on the architectural design of young Czech architects from the company Formosa AA Inc., who are also doctoral students at the CTU in Prague, Faculty of Architecture. It will be built by a consortium of the companies MCI Prague Inc. and a Swiss company NÜSSLI. Similar to the Expo 2015 in Milan, Czech Republic will only rent the pavilion from its creators – it will cost 84 million crowns.
The expert committee comprised the architects Eva Jiřičná, Miroslav Řepa, Zdeněk Lukeš, Michael Klang, David Vávra and representatives of the academic, artistic and business communities Tomáš Matuška, Jan Kukla a Radek Špicar were intrigued by the original concept of an organic structure growing around the cubic lines of the exhibition space.
“I think, that the winning design is the only one that unifies an architectural solution of the pavilion with the main idea of the exposition, that the Czech Republic wants to present,” said the internationally renowned architect and a member of the expert committee Eva Jiřičná.
The technological core of the national exposition will be the S.A.W.E.R. system, which creates water out of the air using solar energy and cultivating the desert with subsurface cultures created by the scientists from the Czech Academy of Sciences and from the Czech Technical University. The art exhibition will be a massive installation of designer glass, which the company Lasvit, based on the design by Maxim Velčovský, will make at their own expense. The pavilion will also provide room for a Czech Restaurant and for 14-day long rotating exhibits.
Five designs made it into the final of the tender for the creator of the Czech pavilion at the Expo 2020 in Dubai, which happened on the 1st of June 2018 in the National Technical Museum. Five more designs had to be eliminated during the presentation of the preliminary designs and a sixth was eliminated during the presentation of the competing models.
“It is sad that, even with an event as large as the General World Exposition, someone delivers the project, that architects and structural engineers worked on for many weeks, after the official deadline – the law does not allow us to do anything else than eliminate these designs, which unfortunately happened to several Czech and foreign interested parties,” said the General Commissioner Jiří František Potužník about the tender.
The Czech pavilion will be in the “Sustainability” zone on a lot with the area of 2 200 square meters and, similarly to the Expo 2015 in Milan, it will be one of the first pavilions near one of the main entrances to the exhibition grounds. The organisers assume, that the World Exposition which will take place from the 20th of October until the 10th of April, will be visited by 25 million people – 70% of which will be foreigners. News Desk
