Prague, Oct 3 (CTK) – The Prague airport will undergo radical changes in the next few years and the interiors should give the message to the landing foreigners that the Czech Republic is an interesting and unique country, daily Mlada fronta Dnes (MfD) writes Saturday.
At present, visitors to the airport cannot be sure whether they arrived in Prague, Vienna, Moscow or some other city – the shops, restaurant chains and advertising looks the same everywhere, the paper writes.
But this cannot be said about all airports. For example, the Canadian airport in Vancouver is decorated by totems of the Red Indians. A typical South Asian rain forest is growing in the middle of the airport terminal in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur. The Schiphol airport in Amsterdam has imaginative references to Dutch heritage.
Prague got inspired by the above airports and decided to follow suit, MfD writes.
The design and shops in the terminal halls and the very confused traffic outside the terminals will change.
“Our aim is to change the artistic design of Terminal One and Terminal Two so that the visitors can easily connect them with the symbols of Prague and the Czech Republic,” said Vaclav Rehor, chairman of the Czech Aeroholding board.
It has been known for only a few days that the architectonic competition for the airport’s interior redesign is the British architectonic studio Chapman Taylor, which designed the interiors of one of the terminals at London’s Heathrow airport.
Jon Hale, who heads the Praguer office of Chapman Taylor, said graphic and textual visual components showing Czech specifics would be used.
Hale said the studio is still considering whether to focus on culture, geography, music, architecture or famous figures from film, literature and sport at the airport.
The reconstruction of the arrival hall of Terminal One, built in 1968, will begin next year and it will be turned into a welcoming centre.
Within the reconstruction, the design and equipment such as lighting will be harmonised, new visitor and information centres will be set up, walkthrough stores and services will be introduced, park places will be redesigned to make the system more intuitive for drivers, and the airport will be newly connected with the railway.
“We consider the space in front of the terminals non-modern and not organised enough for the passengers,” the airport’s spokesman Michal Rehorek told the paper.
In 2014, over 11 million passengers passed through the Vaclav Havel Airport Prague. In 2030, when the reconstruction works is to be completed, the airport should be ready for 21 million passengers a year, and 8700 passengers and 3000 vehicles per hour.
