A House for the Curiosity Collectors Club - 2011

The project is for The Curiosity Collectors Club who collect anything and everything, the club was set up in Prague in 1965, as a reaction to Soviet oppression and the forced isolation of the Czech people from the wider world. The club was a way to see and interact with world. For centuries the Czech nation had been at the cross roads of east and west and while the iron curtain had stopped the physical communication with the west, the physiological impulse to communicated remained strong. Since the fall of the Berlin wall and liberation of the Czech people the club has gone from strength to strength.

The brief I set for myself was to design a non-institution building (not a museum) to houses the very unusual collectors club, to that end I chose the form of a house. The concept is a building open to the public but a space that reflects the personal nature of the collection. The collections would be constantly changing as each member is invited to display his or her unique collection, which are then recorded by the Curator, who lives in a separate apartment but who workings with in the building.

The concept which drove the project was that the building should be a collection and so elements of Prague’s building fabric have been collected and assembled into a building. The building is metaphor for the ever changing layers of Prague that have built up over the century’s as building styles go in and out of fashion and maybe a metaphor for the self, we are the sum total of the 6 closes people to us at any given time.

Tutors: Ben and Sara (2011)