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The jury members of one of the biggest architecture competitions have already seen the designs of Vivid Square after its restoration. Everyone else needs to wait until the end of the year for the competition results as the competition is anonymous.

One of the jury members, architect Michal Fišer, talks why it is better to realize such a big competition in the form of a competition dialogue and what is the approach to the square restoration of the four international teams, which take part in the competition.

The last two days were intense, however despite the measures related to the coronavirus, the teams and jury managed to meet in order to introduce the designs in progress and receive feedback as well. Besides the jury, the local participants, local residents deputies and experts could comment on the designs.

https://zivenamestie.sk/en/architectural-competition/

SNP Square, Kamenné Square and Velvet Revolution Square as well connect within each other a network of various details, history or technical features, which need to be addressed in a different way than via a traditional competition, where the participants just send their designs and the jury picks the winner.

🗣 The dialogue opens the possibilities to collect feedback and improve the designs and implementation of the comments, so that one of the most significant public spaces in Slovakia is restored for the future at a high level, but also that everyone is content with the design. The results of the competition are expected at the end of the year.

❓ We also asked the competetive teams, why they entered the competition to restore Vivid Square and what is the biggest challenge for them. The video feature will be released soon.

One of the most important events that took place in Slovakia gave also the name to the most important public space in Bratislava.

However, SNP Square was developed without vision nor thourough maintenance of the public space. Further, this square is predominantly a tranzit area, about which, although being an important mental footprint of the city, hardly anyone would say that it is in a good shape.

Below you can watch a video feature, where the director of the Public Space Department Roman Žitňanský introduces the identity of the square and describes the state it currently is in.

The video feature was created as a document for the competition teams, which proceeded in the architecture competition to restore SNP, Kamenné and Velvet Revolution Squares.

More details on the Vivid Square project can be found here: https://zivenamestie.sk/en

Related to the ongoing architecture competition to restore SNP, Kamenné and Velvet Revolution Squares, we have prepared more than 20 video features with the experts, participants who are active in the area and competition jury members.

These video features and documents have been created because the architecture competition – competition dialogue to restore these squares – had to be done in the online space instead of meeting in person due to the situation related to coronavirus.

However, the advantage is that now anyone can view them.

https://zivenamestie.sk/en/architectiral-competition

For example, Ivan Štassel, the director of the Urban Conservation Institute in Bratislava, provides information about this area of great interest and detail. He explains, that the SNP Square area was between the 13th and 18th century a vacant area surrounding the city walls, so that the enemy had no place to hide. And since it was not allowed to build in the area, it logically was utilized for the market activities. In the video feature he also shows the underground space, that had various scopes and utilization throughout the last century.

The video features include also the introduction of the competition teams that have proceeded to the second phase of this competition: Atelier Loidl Landscape Architects Berlin; BPR Dr. Schäpertons Consult (Germany); REHWALDT LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS (Germany); ateliér Rusina Frei, s.r.o. OMGEVING cvba MINT (Czech Republic) a Sadar + Vuga d.o.o. (Slovenia).