"I find Mr Kaplicky’s artifact incredibly boastful, capricious, and arrogant!" When President Klaus announced that he would throw his body in front of the site to stop construction of the giant "octopus" selected to be the new National Library, a media storm erupted: Kaplicky had broken the rules, his design was too expensive, the planned site of Letna Plain was too close to the Prague Castle...60 to 90 newspaper pages were devoted to the topic every day. And with his characteristic good humour, Jan began a battle to have his vision honoured: "Courbousier said if everyone liked a building from the start there was something wrong".

"This sort of thing only happens once or twice in a lifetime", says a jubilant Jan, after winning eight out of eight votes for his design for the Prague National library. He had left Prague in 1968 as a Soviet city; his earliest memories were of tiptoeing past a German guard during the occupation. He came to London wary of utopias. And his designs were a weightless, solar-paneled, rocket ride to the future. Returning at 69 for this momentous honour with a new love felt like coming full circle. "Now the only things at stake are that it be a European building, a building in a free country, and that it be a beautiful building".

The celebrations were short-lived. Yet the man responsible for the famous Selfridges 'bubble' building was not short of persistence: "Even at my tender age I’d like to prove you can come up with something different; at least new colors. And he was aware that his space-age aesthetic, so celebrated in London, had unearthed Prague's traditionalist past. He and 5000 members of the public protested: "Democracy builds!", they cried, "Culture evolves independent of government officials". Finally the President agreed to a meeting, in which he celebrated the building as the dawn of a "new Prague". With a baby on the way, Jan was full of hope.

A few months later the Ministry of Culture removed the Director of the National Library for his decision. The message was clear- the library would never be built. When Jan Kaplicky died, mourners flooded out of their houses to stack up books on Letna plain, hoping the government would "build the library around it". And his baby daughter entered the world: "the library will be built", Jan wrote in his diary, "perhaps in ten to 15 years my daughter will go to it. She will never have seen war. She will be able to go where she wants. Do what she wants. And that is wonderful". An intimate look at one of the most visionary architects of our time.