Adria Daraban

The Slav Epic is cycle of twenty enormous canvases, some as tall as 6 metres, presenting a narrative history of the Slavic people in general and the Czech people in particular, painted by the czech artist Alfons Mucha. After finishing the paintings of the Epic, Mucha has donated them to the city of Prague under the condition of building an appropriate shelter for them.At that time, just as well as now, was the Slav Epic a very controversial Theme in Prague. Building a museum for it seems to be unacceptable; a possible solution is building a depot that also allows visitors to contemplate the paintings in a reduced space.
The new building offers a counterpart to the ministrys building on the other side of the 700m wide Letna plateau.
The architecture takes an objektive position in this debate. It's main task are the paintings, no judgement will be formulated.
The material used is concrete. The edifice is reducedt to it's surface and geometry; a homogenous imprint.
The structure of the building is modulary. The unit of the system is the single painting. The maximal width of a painting is 8,10 m (54 X 0,15m), so the used grid unit is 15 cm.
Contemplatingrooms will be build around the painings. They consist out of the space necessary for the optimal observation of a paining ( height, distance, angle)
The structure is the results out of the sequence of twenty such contemplationunits and an additive secondary building for other functions. This way an objektive observationmachine will be build, a machine able to fulfill the climatic necessities for the painings, but also able to offer the optimal contemplationspace for each sequence of the slav epic.

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