Metro D stations to get new designs

The entire line of stations in the planned Metro D will get new designs.

The Prague City Council said that artist David Vávra will oversee creating common elements to unify the stations.

Artises will be selected by a commission with representatives of Prague City Hall, the Prague Public Transit Company (DPP), Prague Institute of Planning and Development (IPR Praha), the National Gallery and construction firm Metroprojekt Praha.

The overall structure of the stations, though, can’t change, as zoning and other permits have been issued. Changing the permits would potentially cause years of delay.

“I took over Metro D at a stage where it is no longer possible to interfere with the architectural form of the stations, but we have found a way to create a new visual style.

Our goal is to make every station a place of high artistic value where Prague citizens will feel comfortable. The new line will not end up like the last Metro A stations,” Prague Deputy Mayor Adam Scheinherr (Praha Sobě) said.

Artists for each station will be approached by Metroprojekt Praha in cooperation with the National Gallery. For each metro station, Metroprojekt Praha will ask for multiple art designs, from which the commission will select the winning designs. These will be incorporated into the project documentation.

The task of architect and artist David Vávra will be to coordinate the selection process and help find elements that can create a new visual design. The commission will decide on the selection itself. “David Vávra should also take care of the unified identity of the line so that it is clear at every single station which line the passenger is on. This is how the first sections of lines A, B and C were built in the center of Prague,” David Krása, CEO of Metroprojekt Praha, said. Common elements for the station furniture will come from a separate design competition.

“Currently, a commission is being set up to deal with the visual appearance of the individual stations. This competition, as it is an architecturally finished station, will have three to five participants who should already be articulate in the existing expression of the stations. Invited authors should come from across generations,” Vávra said.

The selection will be divided into three phases. As part of the first phase, an artistic solution will be prepared for the planned Pankrác station. The design documentation for Olbrachtova and Pankrác stations needs to be completed as early as summer 2019. The proposals will then be prepared by the commission.

At the Olbrachtova station, where it is necessary to prepare the project documentation by July 2019, the commission will select artists as one of its first tasks.

In the second phase, proposals for Nádraží Krč, Nemocnice Krč and Nové Dvory will be created with project documentation planned for December 2020.

As part of the final phase, the commission will prepare proposals for the remaining Libuš, Písnice, Depot Písnice and Náměstí Míru stations, which will be resolved after the optimization of the design for the Pankrác – Nové Dvory section has been completed.

At the Náměstí Bratří Synků station, the design will include an architectural competition, as the zoning permit has not been issued.

A petition in September 2016 asked the city to completely redesign the Metro D stations, as the original designs were already outdated when they were selected. The petition maintains that the metro stations at the time they were designed did not reflect current trends in urban design, but instead are based on postmodern architectural ideas from the 1990s. The stations were designed in 2009 by eight architects working for Metroprojekt.

Those already outdated designs from 2009 are now 10 years old.

But the city in 2016 said that only cosmetic changes could be made at that point, and the new administration is maintaining that stance.

Metro D is a planned subway line that will connect the city center to neighborhoods in the southern part of the city that now has poor public transportation options. The trains will be driverless.

Construction originally was set to begin in 2010, and that was moved to 2012.

Construction is now supposed to start this year.