CNC & Active Offices occupies six floors of a nine-story building in Prague’s Hagibor complex. Studio Reaktor designed the interior to organize media production, editorial work, broadcasting, and informal workplace settings around a curving central service spine known as the mediameba.
CNC & Active Offices Technical Information
- ArchitectsStudio Reaktor
- LocationMarie Schmolkove Square 3493/1, Prague, Czech Republic
- Gross Area11,208 m2 | 120,642 Sq. Ft.
- Project Years2021 – 2025
- Photographs© Studio Flusser
The interior is conceived as a fluid organism that responds to the continuous flow of information and the changing conditions of media production.
– Studio Reaktor
Urban Setting and Base Building Framework
The media house is located within Prague’s Hagibor office complex, at the meeting point of Vinohrady, Strasnice, and Zizkov. Its position on Vinohradska Street gives the building a direct relationship to one of the city’s tram corridors, while access to the Zelivskeho metro station places the workplace within Prague’s public transport network. This metropolitan setting informs the project’s internal logic: the office is conceived not as an isolated corporate environment, but as a dense production infrastructure connected to the movement of people, news, and communication across the city.
The nine-story base building by Bogle Architects establishes a wedge-shaped floor plate with rounded ends, a dark horizontal glass facade, and stepped terraces at its upper levels. Its reinforced concrete structure introduces both regular and inclined columns into the office landscape, creating a framework that the interior does not attempt to conceal. At street level, glazing allows portions of the colored interior envelope to register from the public realm. The illuminated gradients behind the facade turn the lower floors into a partial display of activity, although the building retains the composure of a disciplined commercial volume rather than becoming a literal media screen.
The Mediameba as Spatial Infrastructure
Studio Reaktor organizes the six occupied floors around the mediameba, a continuous system of curving enclosed volumes wrapping the central elevator and service cores. The name invokes an amoeba, but the concept is most effective when understood as spatial infrastructure rather than biomorphic imagery. Its varying perimeter absorbs rooms and services that would otherwise fragment the open office floor: recording studios, photo studios, meeting rooms, focus rooms, phone booths, storage areas, and technical support spaces are consolidated within its body.
This concentration releases the glazed perimeter for open newsroom workstations and shared work areas. Circulation unfolds in the band between the mediameba and facade, where the broad floor plates accommodate both linear movement and intermittent occupation. The curving walls avoid the rigidity of a conventional core-and-corridor office plan, yet their geometry is closely tied to operational requirements on each level. Rather than applying a single repeated shape, the mediameba adjusts in depth and programmatic content, creating different degrees of enclosure, visibility, and pause around the central cores.
The result is a workplace organized by gradients of access and concentration. Highly technical rooms occupy the internal spine, while desks receive daylight at the facade. Between these two conditions, the circulation zone becomes an inhabitable field rather than residual space. Upholstered recesses, benches, display surfaces, and informal seating thicken the edge of the mediameba, allowing short conversations and solitary breaks to occur without requiring separate lounge rooms.
Material, Color, and Environmental Identity
The mediameba’s envelope is articulated through vertically corrugated sheet materials, gradient polycarbonate, reflective stainless steel, and selected brass or copper-toned surfaces. Corrugation gives the walls a continuous vertical grain that softens their scale and catches changing light along curved surfaces. Doors are set flush within the envelope, while small projecting signage elements identify rooms without interrupting the larger field. The same membrane also accommodates screens, notice boards, and digital displays, making the core both an enclosure for production spaces and an interface for workplace communication.
Color is deployed floor by floor rather than as a uniform branding device. Some levels use expansive transitions from yellow through orange and pink to pale blue, while others are organized around green, teal, coral, blue, or reflective metallic grey. The strategy alternates visual emphasis between the central volume and the furniture islands distributed around it. Where the mediameba is materially restrained in silver corrugated metal, desks, meeting rooms, and collaborative settings take on stronger pink or orange tones. Where the central skin is saturated, the adjacent furniture is more neutral, preserving hierarchy across the floor plate.
The rounded and chromatic envelope is set against an exposed technical ceiling of ducts, cable trays, and red sprinkler pipes. This contrast prevents the interior from becoming wholly scenographic. The visible services retain the industrial register associated with newsroom and production environments, while the curved walls provide acoustic separation and visual orientation. Raked concrete columns further complicate the open plan, registering the base building’s structural logic within spaces otherwise defined by soft edges, felt screens, timber worktops, and colored upholstery.
Work Modes, Light, and Informal Occupation
Outside the main mediameba volume, dispersed furniture islands known as orgaspots support work that does not fit the conventional desk. Infocells provide smaller settings for focused information processing; relaxeceptors occupy upholstered niches and lounge areas intended for recovery; cowozomes accommodate brief coworking sessions through alternative seating and shared tables. These elements make the circulation band more productive, although their effectiveness depends on their ability to balance informal accessibility with the acoustic demands of concentrated editorial work.
Open workstations occupy the facade perimeter, where long rows of oak-topped desks receive daylight and views toward mature trees at the edge of the site. Meeting rooms, kitchens, lounges, and breakout areas interrupt this regular ring at key points, introducing different scales of social occupation. Oak-framed glazed partitions preserve visual continuity while separating acoustically demanding spaces. In the upper levels, the stepped form of the building produces terraces that extend the workplace beyond the glazed enclosure, with views across Prague’s surrounding neighborhoods and the Zizkov skyline.
The lighting system, termed newspulses, operates as both illumination and spatial notation. Curving linear fixtures run through the open office and bend around clusters of circular acoustic baffles, while spotlights and smaller point sources become denser above focused work zones. The lights diagram movement between the core, workstations, and shared areas, translating the project narrative of information flow into an environmental system. Their interaction with acoustic elements is particularly effective in the lounges, where suspended felt fins reduce the scale of the larger office volume and create more defined zones for conversation and temporary occupation.
About Studio Reaktor
Studio Reaktor is a Prague, Czech Republic-based creative platform that brings together diverse perspectives and disciplines. Its approach centers on exploring new possibilities and innovative design methods to create buildings and public spaces with unexpected experiences, while developing architectural concepts, planning and construction documentation, detailed design documentation, and ongoing involvement through project realization.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Client: CNC & Active Radio
- Interior Design: Studio Reaktor
- Design team: Jan Kacer, Jakub Heidler, Marek Svoboda, Lukas Baksi, Barbora Lickova, Eliska Nakladalova, Vendula Jirickova
- Base building architect: Bogle Architects
- Developer: Crestyl
- Photography: Studio Flusser
- Studio team portrait: Michaela Dvorakova
- Research references or publications: BBC in Cardiff and London, ITV Media, and Economia in Prague’s Karlín district
