New Structures in the Old Traces. The White Swan.

Nowadays we are facing a constant degradation of places that play a very important role of the public activity in our cities. Places of shopping. The invention of European metropolitan life of 19th century – the shopping passage and department store does not represent actual trends anymore. Instead of that the cheap imitation substitutes the original.

The White swan department store was chosen as an example of how to meet this challenge. The building was designed by Josef Kittrich and Josef Hruby in 1939 as the largest department store in Eastern Europe. It was a synonymous of the highest quality and success of the Czechoslovakia. The rational spatial reinforced concrete skeleton boasted by many innovative features. The most important part was a sophisticated way of advertising - the neon swan on the top of the roof, the blank glazed facade and the row of display windows on the ground floor. A general problem of department stores is the number of floors. The White Swan has six floors of sale area. The goal was to find a way how to make this construction attractive for the consumer again. On the basis of the Josef Kittrich’s text I construct a program for the tower. As an attraction. A tower made of sugar. It is provided by extending the current tower up to one hundred and thirty meters. To the height of the tip of the Prague castle on the other side of the river. The idea of the paternoster display is conceptually twisted. Instead of the goods, the customer becomes the one who is carried. The principle of the construction is based on two steel framed tubes braced by a ramp structure in the middle. Inside of the inner tube there is the space for an opulent show of the very best from the store. The exhibition space is supplied by vertically movable platforms stocked in the basement. To see the exhibition customers take the glass cabins of a paternoster lift from the 5th floor. The lift ends at the summit of the tower where there is also a space to view Prague from above. The tower define as a new pillar on the map of Prague. Energy is added to the place where it was missing. It is becoming a new dominant to the collection of the city of a hundred spires. The White Swan rises to the height again and by its own self-promotion becomes unattainable again. The new tower of Babylon.