Cycling landscape
An abandoned hydropower canal in South Bohemia has been transformed into a new form of public infrastructure, where industrial heritage, landscape and contemporary architecture merge into a single spatial experience. Designed by Czech studio A8000 in collaboration with transport engineer Ondřej Zenkl, the 5.5-kilometre route between Loučovice and Vyšší Brod reactivates a forgotten technical monument as a cycling path embedded in the landscape.
At the heart of the project lies the historic supply canal of the Čertovy proudy hydropower plant, completed in 1902 and considered one of the earliest large hydroelectric plants in Central Europe. Following decades of abandonment after the construction of the Lipno dam, the canal had fallen into ruin, gradually disappearing beneath vegetation and debris. Rather than treating this legacy as a relic to preserve or a brownfield to redevelop, the project proposes a third approach: to reactivate obsolete infrastructure through contemporary public use.
The design is rooted in minimal intervention. Instead of inserting a new architectural object into the site, the project works through clearing, repair and precise adaptation of the existing concrete structure. The original canal remains legible throughout, not as backdrop but as the project itself.
Its most distinctive section leads cyclists directly through a 250-metre stretch of the former reinforced-concrete aqueduct, where the route occupies the original canal bed suspended above the Vltava valley. Carefully cut openings in the canal walls frame views into the dramatic landscape of Devil’s Rapids, while preserving the monolithic presence of the historic structure.
Rather than masking age and materiality, the intervention amplifies them. The raw concrete mass, with walls rising in places above human height, creates a sequence of compressed and open spatial conditions that oscillate between infrastructure, architecture and landscape. A unifying white finish was applied to the concrete surfaces, emphasizing the canal’s sculptural continuity while allowing weathering and surrounding vegetation to gradually fold the structure back into its environment.
For A8000, the project represents an exploration of adaptive reuse at territorial scale. Unlike conventional conversions that assign obsolete infrastructure a new program, this intervention allows infrastructure to remain infrastructure — transformed from carrying water into carrying movement.
"The ambition was not to impose a new form, but to reveal the latent spatial quality of what already existed,” says architect Martin Krupauer, co-author of the project. “The canal was not treated as a ruin, but as an extraordinary piece of infrastructure capable of serving the landscape again."
This approach is also reflected in the route’s geometry. Rather than being newly composed, its form follows the inherited logic of the original engineering work — a linear concrete curve shaped by topography and technical necessity. What emerges is less a designed object than a discovered spatial condition.
Set within a protected river landscape, the project offers an alternative model for working with heritage, infrastructure and sustainability: one based not on expansion, but on transformation through restraint.
More than a cycling route, the project positions forgotten engineering works as cultural and spatial resources, suggesting how existing infrastructures can be reimagined as contemporary public landscapes.
