The Technical Museum in Letná will open by September 2010

Prague - The second phase of the reconstruction of the main building of the National Technical Museum in Prague at Letná (NTM) has been completed. General Director Horymír Kubíček said at today's press conference that the museum received 131 million crowns this summer for the renovation and development of exhibitions. "Competitions for installations will only be initiated now. We expect to open by September 2010 at the latest, marking 100 years since our first collections opened in Prague,” he noted.
    The reconstruction started in 2003, and the museum has been closed to visitors for two years. The gradual opening of exhibitions is planned for the summers of 2009 to 2010. The goal is to restore the building in the spirit of the original vision of architect Milan Babuška from the 1930s. The removal of older construction modifications has created four new exhibition halls and two smaller halls for temporary exhibitions on the ground floor and in the basement. For the first time, NTM will feature exhibitions on printing and on architecture, construction, and design; the transportation hall as well as the ore and coal mine will be modernized, and the exhibitions on astronomy and photographic and film techniques will be expanded.
    According to Kubíček, the newly created exhibitions should allow visitors to actually touch the exhibits. This also applies to the collection titled Technology in Everyday Life, which will showcase discoveries and inventions that are now considered completely ordinary.
    This July marked the 100th anniversary since the founding of what was then the Technical Museum of the Kingdom of Bohemia. The first collections were made available starting September 28, 1910, in the building of the Schwarzenberg Palace. The building at Letná was constructed between 1938 and 1941, but it was immediately assigned to the Protectorate Ministry of Posts. After the war, part of the Letná premises was returned to the museum, but the period during which various foreign tenants occupied the space lasted until 1999. Prior to the reconstruction, only a tenth of nearly 50,000 collection items were exhibited, and approximately 200,000 people viewed them each year. The museum also oversees more than 800 archival collections, an extensive collection of photographs, drawings, and graphics. Its specialized historical library has over 200,000 volumes of professional literature.
    The third phase will involve the reconstruction of the basement, facade, and museum grounds, including storage areas and other facilities from 2009 to 2011. In the outlook for 2016, the construction of a new museum building on the adjacent plot is planned, which is expected to cost up to 1.5 billion crowns. Additional storage facilities will be established in Čelákovice, and a railway museum will be located in the former locomotive depot area of Masaryk Station. Its construction from 2009 to 2012 will require 500 million crowns.
    "Another major project is the establishment of a Center for Building Heritage in Plasy, which is planned to open in the area of the former Cistercian monastery in 2014," added Kubíček. The budget for the three phases of reconstruction, along with exhibition costs, amounts to 572 million crowns.
    Just these days, the first of three planned "jubilee" publications has been released. In particular, the photographic book is titled The Story of the National Technical Museum. The next will be a comprehensive catalog of the collections.