Emporium
City
GFA = 9 588 600 m2
When you drove outside any major city 30 years ago, you found yourself quickly in the countryside. Today Cities are surrounded by zones which are neither city nor the country land. The very same urban substance sterilizes main traffic arteries. View of rural land while driving is no longer possible. In fact agricultural land is disappearing with exponentially increasing speed.
What is this mute urban typology, blamed to be responsible for this phenomenon? Logistic Centres! Single-storey volumes covering vast land, engineered to store as much goods with as little human supervision as possible. Stored artefacts are then picked up by trucks and moved to other logistic centres closer to the end consumer.
As such logistic colonization is a relatively recent phenomenon, there are no rules neither examples of good practice. Furthermore, exponentially growing coverage of landscape by logistic centres in the Czech Republic is rather alarming.
The Emporium is a new typology of city design to liberate the entire Czech countryside from logistic halls and benefit from their proximity. A carefully selected site of an empty coal mine allows the Emporium to capitalize on all major modes of transport such as trains, ships or planes. In addition, Bilina is located in the heart of all major European truck routes. The new multilevel storage strategy was invented to minimize the footprint and enable a plantation of a great forest around its perimeter.
We expect the Emporium to provide a vital injection into the stagnating economy of the North Bohemian region.
