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The administrative building’s terraces descend to Námestie
L’udovíta Štúra, as the outdoor gallery descends the opposite
way toward the new space to be created by razing the residential
buildings on Riečna ulica and Lodná ulica. Indeed, even
the facing wing, i.e. the “bridging” in an unbuilt alternative,
descended past the Hotel Devín corner through a cascading
contemporary art gallery and into the same space. When the
alternative including the outdoor gallery was not realized,
Dedeček punctuated the administrative building’s walkable
roof with a high gable, its window openings running just as
the outdoor gallery’s terraces and the cascading arrangement
of the contemporary art gallery were to descend. Among other
things, this alluded to the newly opened checkerboard field
that was both inside and above the site. This interconnection,
or to be more precise transfusion, of the city’s public spaces
with the gallery’s half-public outdoor gallery spaces, became an
urban planning contextual prerequisite for any other possible
architectural contextualities. It is literally the clustering of public
and semi-public outdoor squares on which the SNG site grew.
Another circle of alternatives brought in by Dedeček’s
compositional working version of architecture had to do with
deciding between a figurative representational or a nonfigurative
abstract building or area. At first glance, this is
a national gallery for the state and the nation with no obvious
reference to extra-architectural meanings – unless we
are tempted to consider the raised bridging and opening of
the view of the Water Barracks as a move towards representing
19 th century historicism, which is even now a sore point
in our national consciousness, and if we see the preferred
red/white colouring as identification with pan-Slavism; and
if we choose not to understand the layering of gallery floor
volumes, such as one might find in log cabins, as evocative of
folk architecture in Slovakia. The SNG area site employs no
permanent art decoration in a figurative function, as is the case
with Dedeček’s Supreme Court. This is understandable, as the
project intended the gallery to show temporary and changing
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