The City of Prague’s integrated gravity sewerage system was designed in 1893 by the British expert William Heerlein Lindley (1853–1917), who was working at the time as a municipal engineer in Frankfurt am Main. He drew on two earlier such projects in this design, one by Jan Kaftan and James Hobrecht and the other by Josef Václavek and Vincenc Ryvola (1849–1917). Acting through the municipal sewerage works office, Ryvola also designed and oversaw the construction and operation of the mechanical wastewater treatment plant in Bubeneč, the parameters of which were established by Lindley.
Wastewater flowed through four trunk sewers into a 34-metre-long underground grit chamber enclosed within a brick vault with a 12-metre span, where sewage was removed by filtering the wastewater first through grids and then through movable screens, while sand and ash were deposited on the conical base. Fine organic sludge was deposited in ten 87-metre-long arched sedimentation tanks located to the south of the operations building and was pumped out for use as fertiliser, while the water was released into the Vltava River. (...)
In August 1901 the contract to build the system was awarded to a company owned by the creatively ambitious architect and builder Quido Bělský (1855–1909), who employed a number of young architects in his design office – such as Alois Dryák, Bedřich Bendelmayer, Bohumil Hypšman, and Jan Letzel. The originally plain design for the above-ground buildings was replaced with an architecturally striking one that coupled light-coloured plaster and clinker bricks with diversely shaped windows and window frames, which reflect on the outside of the building the different functions of its interior spaces.
The building’s construction was completed in 1905 and then the technological equipment was installed. The pipes, tanks, bridge and lift frames, and the flood and sludge pumps in the basement of the building were all supplied by the First Czech-Moravian Machinery Factory (První českomoravská továrna na stroje) in Libeň, in Prague, while the Joint-Stock Engineering Company (Akciová společnost strojírny), formerly Breitfeld, Daněk & spol., in Karlín manufactured the two 60 HP stationary steam engines and their boilers that operated on the ground floor of the building’s west wing, to which a 30-metre chimney was attached.
The flow of wastewater turned a water wheel, which has not been preserved but was originally located in a special underground chamber, and the wheel drove the ventilation fans located in the shafts leading to a second, eastern chimney. The plant began trial operations on 27 June 1906. After that its machinery was upgraded approximately every twenty years, until in 1967 it was replaced by a new plant on Císařský Island, which, however, continued to use the older plant’s sedimentation tanks.
In 1991 the plant became a listed heritage site. In 2010 it was granted the highest level of protection as a Czech National Heritage Site, and in 2020 it was nominated for inclusion on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Since 1988 the site has been used by the volunteer ‘Steam – Club’, whose members brought both steam engines back into operation and in 1992 established a foundation that facilitated the building’s conversion into the Ekotechnické museum (Ecotechnical Museum), which is now run by the City of Prague through its property management company.
Papírenská 199, 160 00 Praha 6-Bubeneč, Czechia
