The Public Servants’Colony in Dejvice, Prague, and the New Ideal of Urban Morphology. Anomaly or Paradigmatic Change?, Umění 63, 2015, 363-383. (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Architect and the City A Double Oeuvre Jože Plecnik in Ljubljana (OASE #89)
Not many cities bear the autograph of an architect as strongly as Ljubljana. Slovenian architect Jože Plecnik has devoted most of his life as a practicing architect to the improvement of his home town: from small-scale interventions such as pavements, lamp poles and statues, to buildings, bridges and squares, grand city plans and the design of the city’s cemetery. This contribution offers a literary description of three periods in the life and work of Jože Plecnik. The author traces the paths of the architect in contemporary Ljubljana, imagining through fictional diary entries how his reading of the city and his view of the role of the architect changed in three successive periods.
In 1990, a newsreel which registered the emergence of new types of services after the end of socialism in Poland, showed an intervention of a security contractor in the neighborhood of Przyczółek Grochowski, a housing estate in Warsaw built in 1974 which, as the lector authoritatively states, “was first harmed by the architects”. Their names were not mentioned in the movie, but for those interested in Polish post-war architecture, this was not necessary: Przyczółek Grochowski was designed between 1963 and 1969 by Oskar Hansen, the Polish member of the Team 10, and his wife Zofia. The estate was a part of their visionary Linear Continuous System (LCS): an overarching design for the complete urbanization of Poland in four large stripes stretching throughout the whole territory of the country, from south to north. The design of Przyczółek, a block of flats for 6600 inhabitants, stretching 1.5 km, aimed at an egalitarian space for living and at paving the way to the visionary project of the LCS. When built within the restrictions of state-socialist construction industry, much of the vitality of its original vision was lost, leading to the incomprehension of architects' intensions among the inhabitants of Warsaw. After the end of socialism it became a paradigmatic example of the dilapidated postsocialist city characterized by socio-spatial segregation and fragmentation, surrounded by recently constructed gated apartment houses and nicknamed “Pekin” (Beijing) with regard to the poor condition and inhabitant density. This paper analyses the design process, construction, and use of the estate by its inhabitants, as well as of the shifts in social composition and ownership structures of Przyczółek in the last 40 years. Such account is necessary to speculate about the possibilities and challenges for the preservation of this building which did not fulfill its promise of a renewed everyday.
Prefabricated housing estates, which were created in the Czech lands between the late 1950s up until the mid-1990s, have in recent years emerged as a subject of interest, and not only for architectural history. An extensive interdisciplinary research project into Czech housing estates, covered by the five-year grant “Prefabricated Estates in the Czech Republic as Part of the Urban Living Environment”, has also included the participation of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague. In the over four decades of their construction, these housing estates underwent architectural development, though this need not immediately be apparent on first view. For us to deal with all of the theoretical as well as practical problems posed by the phenomenon of the prefabricated housing estate, we need first of all to find a suitable terminology and a basic periodicisation, which has been the aim of our work. Because it has been found within the documentation of selected housing estates to be impossible to accept any of the previous chronological and stylistic divisions of mass housing without reservations, the article discusses a concept for periodicisation that would apply on the level of the entire nation. The proposal is based on the architectonic and urban analysis of the estates, the development of prefabrication and panel technology, as well as on the era’s political and economic situations, which directly influenced the construction of public housing. The housing estates of Prague have been selected as a model instance for the reason that they provide the hitherto most thoroughly researched locality in the Czech Republic, while the national capital at the same time acts as the nation’s most influential cultural centre.
Writing architectural history and building a Czechoslovak nation, 1887-1918
Nation, Style, Modernism. München, Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte and Warsaw, International Cultural centre, 2006
As part of the awakening national identity of the Czechs before and after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Czech artists and architects were charged with the heavy burden of creating a national identity for their young republic. Recent studies have dealt with this issue. Less well documented is that, in addition, the writing of the art and architectural history, assumed a specific, operative role in the project of Czechoslovak nation building, as well as in its filo-German counterforces. In the construct of the nation — as in Czech modern architectural practice — architectural history gave palpable reality to an otherwise imaginery community. Similarly, the notion of architecture as a creative act was the quintessential Masarykian metaphor for the building of a modern nation. My paper focuses on discussions of national identity and language, and on the rediscovery of national architectural heritage as a collectivizing power for the young Czechoslovak Republic. It will deal with the question of “The Czechness of our art” (Jiránek), and with how local tradition was understood probably less as national, than as a necessary tool to open up the possibility of an own modern architecture. It will show the forces acting in the field of the architectural historiography, especially of the Baroque period, on both the Czech and the German sides — from writings with Czech nationalist leanings to German Anschlußfähige publications. The paper will also draw attention to changes in terminology and styles of writing art history and in the nature of the readership and publishing culture. The period and political context taken into consideration extends from the moment of the coming of age of modern art history — parallel to nationalism — in the 1880’s, till the creation of the First Czechoslovak Republic in 1918.
Cathleen M. Giustino, "The Ghetto and the Castle: Modern Urban Design and Knowledge Transfer in Historic Prague before and after 1918." In _Interurban Knowledge Exchange in Southern and Eastern Europe, 1870-1950_, eds. Eszter Gantner, Heidi Hein-Kircher and Oliver Hochadel (Routledge, 2020): 25-49.
Cathleen M. Giustino, "The Ghetto and the Castle: Modern Urban Design and Knowledge Transfer in Historic Prague before and after 1918." In _Interurban Knowledge Exchange in Southern and Eastern Europe, 1870-1950_, eds. Eszter Gantner, Heidi Hein-Kircher and Oliver Hochadel (Routledge, 2020): 25-49.
1920s and 1930s Prague Architecture with Special Focus on the German Cultural Circle
Umění/ Art, 2020
The interwar Prague architecture scene was a very heterogeneous milieu where Czech, German, and Jewish architects met with, but also missed each other. The study focuses on Prague’s German-speaking group, which formed a unique and complicated structure. Prague’s German-speaking architects included Czech Germans (Deutschböhmen), Jews from Czechoslovakia as well as the rest of the former monarchy, Germans, and Austrians. Given this high level of diversity within this broadly conceived group, the author presents a division of German-speaking architects according to their orientation towards specific cultural environment, i.e. into a German-oriented group and a circle on the borderline between the Czech and German cultural milieu. The first group, on which the article focuses, exhibits more common characteristic traits, creating certain mini-centres within Prague’s cultural scene. On the basis of three exemplary cases of architects from this German cultural milieu, the article introduces important moments defining Prague’s German architecture scene. In the case of Adolf Foehr, this has to do primarily with the activity of Prague’s German housing associations. In some parts of Prague, German apartment buildings markedly impacted upon the character of the quarter. Also important in addition to a certain stylistic specificity are personal connections among architects and construction builders, as well as between architects and Prague authorities. One of the methodological backbones of the entire research consisted in reconstructing this imaginary network of ties and relations. Fritz Lehmann’s example illustrates the complicated situation at Prague’s German Technical University and the backdrop of rivalry within the German-speaking milieu. Architect Lehmann is also author of the reconstruction of the German House (Deutsches Haus) and a few published articles that untangle the complicated welter of Czech-German connections and potential nationalist antagonisms. Rudolf Hildebrand, the article’s last exemplary architect, corroborates its proposed observations in his uniquely preserved personal memoirs.