sng_2016-05-12_high-single-crop_k3

The Slovak National Gallery area site came into existence over
almost twenty years, from the early 1960s to the early 1980s, in
several stages. Project documentation has been preserved for
each stage / see …site’s genesis, analysis and reflection p. 15 /. This relatively
lengthy period of design and the subsequent staged realization
meant that the form of the designed work fundamentally
changed, and the architecture was never completed as a whole.
The staging also enabled Vladimír Dedeček to work into it aspects
of his earlier solutions (such as the urbanism of the checkerboard
raster and the natural lighting methods of Bratislava’s
Secondary economics school on Ulica Februárového vít’azstva),
and to ponder them in parallel with work on other projects (such
as Bratislava’s Comenius University Natural Science faculty in
Mlynská dolina, and Bratislava-Petržalka’s Multipurpose exhibition
facility). While the SNG was conceived as a renovation of
the Vodné kasárne (Water Barracks), which after 1948 were
already in the service of the new Slovak National Gallery, but
altogether entailed razing many buildings and building a series
of new ones. Working closely with then-director of the SNG
Karol Vaculík, Vladimír Dedeček came out against the concept
of reserving the Water Barracks as the domain of older art while
housing modern and contemporary art in another appropriate
location; instead he advocated combining these two forms in
a single area site, based around the same Water Barracks.
Thus the assignment was to become the linking of two
gallery types, not in one building but in a single area. This in turn
conditioned Dedeček’s conceptual working version 4 of architecture.
First of all, it pushed the period’s preconceptions on the
gallery to be rethought, so as not to be in a single mono-block
building or a pavilion arrangement of multiple buildings, but also
in the sense of interlinking the site’s interior and exterior spaces,
and putting into contact the SNG outdoor spaces with those
of the city. Interlinking urban planning and architectural aspects
had from the first been characteristic of Dedeček’s work and
became a constant in his thinking, but the SNG project boasts
even more striking and noteworthy layering and proliferation.
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