EN
The study presents expert and political discussion of the planned demolition of Bratislava Castle and the Podhradie area at the bottom of the castle hill from the end of the 1930s to the mid-1940s. Using archive and journalistic texts from the period, as well as analysis of the actual architectural and urbanist plans, it describes the course of efforts to transform the historic symbol of the city, as well as the opposition and criticism of these plans. The study considers two competitions from 1938 and 1942, held under two different political regimes – liberal democratic Czechoslovakia and the authoritarian wartime Slovak Republic. Comparison of the two competitions shows the formal and content similarity in spite of regime, which defined the modern productive and technocratic thinking of specialists more than political ideology.