Following Paths – Museum

Following Paths is a museum concept set in Prague’s Old Town that lets movement itself shape the building. Designed by Nana Ayensua Amonoo and Angelica Marzoni, the project sits on a site adjacent to the Old Jewish Museum, and it borrows two competing geometries to find its form. Prague’s Old Town showcases several blocks with uniformed orientations, yet the Old Jewish Museum diverts from that obvious grid, tilting slightly to pay homage to the flow of the nearby river. Because the new museum stands next to it, the design adopts both orientations at once: the angle of the old museum and the angle of the surrounding town.

From this overlap the new museum morphed into several paths that lead to the formation of different levels. The scheme reads as a network of slow paths, the ramps, and faster paths, the elevators and stairs. These paths are the main elements to which all other spaces are attached and subsequently composed. Upon entering, one path leads to the upper level, one runs directly to the river bank, and another descends to the underground level. The route toward the water appears at ground level by the entrance, then disappears into an underground tunnel that eventually reaches Prague’s river nearby.

Movement as the organizing idea

A museum lives or dies by the quality of its circulation. Visitors arrive with different goals, some browsing slowly and some heading straight for a single gallery, so a building that offers both ramps and stairs can serve every kind of visit without forcing one pace on everyone. Sloped routes also carry a long history in museum design, where a continuous incline can hold an unbroken narrative across changing levels. By treating ramps and stairs as the primary structure rather than leftover connectors, the project turns the act of walking through into the exhibition experience itself.

Context matters just as much in a city like Prague, where new construction answers to centuries of layered fabric and a protected historic core. Aligning the new museum with both its immediate neighbor and the wider town is a quiet way of belonging to two stories at once. The link drawn toward the Vltava extends that thinking, pulling the building past its own walls and tying the interior journey to the geography that gave Prague its shape. Following Paths suggests that orientation, slope, and route can do the work a façade usually claims, letting a museum be understood through how it is crossed.