The award was presented to them. Mies van der Rohe

The winning architects from the Berlin studio designed an innovative campus building with the evolving academic landscape in the post-pandemic world in mind – a world of lectures often conducted online, with a rapidly changing model of university campus life.

The two-story building serves as a new landmark for the sprawling campus.

“The main goal was to create an accessible and versatile space, intended for students of all disciplines, offering a contemporary learning environment. The resulting open space concept favors a variety of student activities and provides a flexible environment for group work, seminars, lectures and relaxation,” write the architects about their facility. .

The Plato Gallery of Contemporary Art in Ostrava is a converted slaughterhouse from the early 20th century. KWK Promes won a closed competition for this reconstruction.

Konieczny is the most popular Polish architect. His most famous buildings are the Przełomy Dialogue Center in Szczecin – the Best Building in the World 2016 at the Berlin Architecture Festival and the Aatrial house – the best house in the world in 2006 in the World Architecture News plebiscite. The KWK Promes office is based in Katowice.

No Pole has received the award yet. Mies van der Rohe. Only one studio before KWK Promes was in the final – BBGK Architekci for the Katyn Museum in Warsaw. However, there is an object in Poland that has been awarded the “Mies” award. This is the Philharmonic in Szczecin. However, it is an object designed by the Spanish-Italian studio Barozzi/Veiga.

The beginnings of work on the project are recalled by KWK employees in the architect's biography “Konieczny. Na styk”:

“I remember when we looked at the building (…). It was a complete ruin, which was alarming. There were uncontrolled and repeated reconstructions from different times. Some places were in danger of collapse. Moisture and mold. A challenge…” – recalls Michał Lisiński. “The form of the brick building is somewhat reminiscent of a station in the 19th-century imperial style. The main part consists of two wings topped with a turret in the middle with round windows resembling clocks. There are several annexes adjacent to the building, doubling the area of ​​the building in total. The location is not easy. On the one hand, there is a railway line, with on the other, a multi-lane road with an overpass, and right next to it there is a tin supermarket where the gallery has its temporary headquarters. “It's only a few hundred meters from the very center, but the area looks almost like a suburb.”

“I see an old, dirty building with holes in various places, built of brick. And I already know that these holes will be used. We plug them with modern tissue, plastic concrete on old ornaments. We go out to the square. We keep the mess on the brick, and the windows still have look a bit dusty. We are creating a square around it like in Szczecin, i.e. an extension of the exhibition space,” Konieczny illustrates the concept of the reconstruction.

“The most eye-catching element of the KWK Promes project is the heavy revolving doors installed in places where there were huge gaps in the walls. They look like concrete, but of course they would be too heavy. In this way, the gallery opens onto three sides of the surrounding square “.

The construction took nearly three years and coincided with the pandemic, starting at the beginning of 2020. The official opening of the gallery took place on September 21, 2022.

The authors of Konieczny's biography describe the Plato gallery as follows:

“The strength and curse of Plato is its location. Driving by car from the highway towards the city center, you can see the gallery building from the viaduct over the railway tracks. Unfortunately, there are no trains from Poland to the Ostrava-Stodolní station, right next to the gallery, but Plato can be seen , going further, for example on a trip to Prague. From this perspective, the object may remain unnoticed, but it may also attract attention with its industrial architecture, typical of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, and the four-sided tower with round windows towering over its roof perhaps the striking concrete gates, the chaotic neighborhood of an empty hypermarket and a small new housing development.

Plato is located on the outskirts of the city center. From the main square of Ostrava, Masarykovo námĕstí, you walk there for a kilometer, passing dozens of pubs of all kinds along the way, an architectural curiosity for connoisseurs – the Bachner department store designed by an outstanding architect of the first half of the 20th century, Erich Mendelsohn, and the old Gallery of Fine Arts, where you can admire a painting Gustav Klimt's Judith. Plato and the square in front of the old slaughterhouse can be the finale of such a walk, they can also be its part or the beginning if someone decides to take the opposite direction.

Inside the building you can discover its intricate structure. What is surprising is the narrow corridor covered on both sides with the same brick as on the façade. Tadeusz Goryczka, Konieczny's Czech collaborator, explains to us that originally it was a passage between four separate buildings without a roof. The exhibition halls are impressive in size and well lit. You would like to push the closed gates so that they open onto the square. There is a cafe inside – the standard of this type of places in recent decades. Apart from the dark rusty brick of the façade, there are no colors other than white on the walls and gray in the concrete. Practically the entire ground floor is an exhibition space, upstairs there are administration rooms and places for workshops or smaller exhibitions. On both sides of the gallery there is a publicly accessible, gradually greened public space. The architects intended it to blend with the gallery space thanks to the opening doors.

The award in the “Rising Star” category went to the Library building. Gabriel Garcia Marquez in Barcelona, ​​designed by SUMA Arquitectura.

The finalists also included the Reggio primary school in Madrid, designed by Andres Jacque, and the reconstruction of the monastery of St. Francis in Sainte-Lucie-de-Tallano by Amelie Tavella Architects and an unusual public space in Lund, Sweden, by the Brendeland & Kristoffersen duo.

European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture Mies van der Rohe – this is the full name of the most prestigious award in the world of architecture and urban planning in Europe. It is co-financed by the European Commission and awarded by the foundation. Mies van der Rohe based in Barcelona. The first edition took place in 1988.

The award is granted every two years. In the first stage, independent experts in the field of architecture indicated by the foundation nominate objects of their choice from all over the continent. From these hundreds of nominations, a small jury (different each time) first selects the 40 best facilities, and then the five finalists.