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Prague and Bratislava between late socialism and capitalism

Discussion with the editors of the current monothematic issue of A&U – In Search of Postmodern City: Urban Changes and Continuities in East Central Europe between Late Socialism and Capitalism (1970-2000) Matej Spurný, Henrieta Moravčíková, Petr Roubal and Peter Szalay

Galerie VI PER Praha, 19. 4. 2024

Jak vyprávět dramatický příběh metropolí středovýchodní Evropy na sklonku 20. století? Cestu zdejších měst od pozdního socialismu k restauraci kapitalismu můžeme rámovat jako příběh emancipace z područí rigidního centralistického plánování, nebo jako hledání východisek ze selhání modernistických utopií. Můžeme ale také hovořit o sebedestrukci urbanistické expertízy, vyprávět o postupném oslabení pozice architektů a zejména urbanistů, kteří vyklidili pole spontánnímu vývoji, laikům, politickým kompromisům a především neoliberální komodifikaci jako dominantnímu faktoru rozhodujícímu o vývoji měst v divokých devadesátých letech.

Aktuální tematické číslo časopisu Architektúra & urbanizmus se věnuje těmto a dalším otázkám. Editoři čísla Matěj Spurný a Petr Roubal z Ústavu pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR, a Henrieta Moravčíková s Peter Szalayom z Oddelania architektúry Historického ústavu SAV, představí studie autorů a autorek z různých krajin středný Evropy a Balkánu uveřejněné v novém čísle časopisu. Především však budou diskutovat vlastní výzkumy transformace dvou hlavních měst bývalého Československa Prahy a Bratislavy.

9. 3. 2023  18.00

ARTFORUM, Kozia 40, Bratislava

Získať cenovo dostupné bývanie je rastúcim problémom u nás i v celej Európe. Zdá sa, že tento problém nedokáže riešiť komerčná výstavba a stále častejšie sa preto hovorí o alternatívnych spôsoboch financovania výstavby, ale aj užívania bytových domov. Jednou z nich je aj družstevná výstavba bytov, o ktorej dnes u nás príliš často nepočuť. Bytové družstevníctvo má pri tom na Slovensku, respektíve v Československu hlbokú tradíciu, ktorá siaha až do Rakúsko-Uhorskej monarchie. O tom čo vlastne bolo bytové družstevníctvo v Československu, ako sa menil jeho koncept, prečo nastal jeho útlm a ako ovplyvnilo nielen našu spoločnosť, ale aj architektúru budeme diskutovať s historičkou architektúry Katarínou Haberlandovou z Oddelenia architektúry Historického stavu SAV v Bratislave a historičkou Martou Edith Holečkovou z Ústavu pro súdobé dejiny AV ČR v Prahe. Obe hostky svoje výskumy publikovali v rámci aktuálneho monotematického čísla časopisu Architektúra & urbanizmus – Od filantropie k systému sociálneho štátu.

Podujatie vzniká v spolupráci s kníhkupectvom Artfórum Bratislava

International conference – call for abstracts

The conference focuses on past urban planning and sustainable management of historic urban spaces, presenting the latest research into European city planning at the turn of the 20th century and emphasising what cities along the Danube were practising. Conference papers will be published digitally after the conference. Selected papers will be also recommended for publishing in the journal Architektúra & urbanizmus.

The conference will be held on 21st June 2022 at Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, Faculty of Architecture and Design.

Keynote speakers of the conference:
Prof. Dr. Eve Blau, Professor of the History and Theory of Urban Form and Design and Director of Research, Harvard University Graduate School of Design
Dr. Ing. Carola Hein, Professor and Head of the History of Architecture and Urban Planning, TU Delft
Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Ákos Moravánszky, Professor emeritus, ETH Zürich, Institut gta

The official conference language will be English, meaning that keynotes, sessions, and digital proceedings published after the conference will all be in that language. There will be no simultaneous translation.

Abstracts should be sent to nina.bartosova@stuba.sk They should be no more than 300 words (excluding title and authors’ information) and submitted in English. The title, author’s name, affiliation, author’s email, and keywords should be mentioned in the abstract.
Submitted abstracts will be peer reviewed by members of the Programme Committee. Receipt of completed abstracts will be acknowledged by email as soon as they are submitted. The Programme Committee reserves the right to determine how an abstract will be accepted.

Extended deadline for abstracts: 31st March 2022
Notification of acceptance: 12th April 2022

Deadline for submission of the full paper: 21st June 2022, the day of the conference

Members of the Programme Committee:
prof. Dr. Ing. arch. Henrieta Moravčíková, FAD STU
prof. Ing. arch. Jana Pohaničová, PhD., FAD STU
doc. Ing. arch. Nina Bartošová, PhD., FAD STU
Mgr. Peter Szalay, PhD., Institute of History of SAS

Participation in the conference is free of charge.

Conference contact: Nina Bartošová / nina.bartosova@stuba.sk

The current mono-thematic issue of Architektúra & urbanizmus edited by Henrieta Moravčíková, Peter Szalay and Rostislav Švácha, presents soundings into the destruction and rejection of postwar modern architecture across a wide geographic span, from Belgium into Central Europe. The varied causes and narratives of the problematic acceptance of late 20th-century architectural heritage presented in the contributions will serve as a basis for discussion between editors and authors.

A recording of the discussion is available here

On 21 June 2021, just short of 86 years of age, the historian and theorist of architecture, teacher and translator, longstanding collaborator with the present journal and our dear friend, Docent Ing. arch. Pavel Halík, CSc, died. He was born in 1935 in Stržanov, not far from Žďár nad Sázavou and its famous pilgrimage church to St. John of Nepomuk by Jan Blažej Santini. In fact, he regularly visited Santini’s church with his parents in his childhood, even serving as an altar boy during mass, as he later liked to recount. His lifelong theme, however, was not the Baroque but modern and contemporary architecture, and at the start of his scholarly career even more significantly modern urban planning. This latter interest was evidently first stimulated by one of his professors at the Faculty of Architecture at the Czech Technical University (ČVUT) in Prague, urban planner Jindřich Krise, for whom he also worked as an assistant after graduation. Pavel Halík never assumed the career of a practicing architect; his reflective nature led him to the theoretical observation of this profession, and to penetrating analyses of work both domestic and international. His great passion was discussion, not only about architecture but reaching into wide areas of culture and art, which he knew in equal depth to his own field. In the mid-1960s, Pavel Halík joined the multidisciplinary team of the Cabinet of Architectural Theory at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, which after many organisational shifts became part of the current Department of Art History, and worked there up until the new millennium. His pedagogical activity, paradoxically, started during his three-year stay in Oran, Algeria. At the start of the 1990s he began teaching at the architectural department of the Academy of Fine Arts, lectured at the summer school of urbanism in Paris and then, up until 2019, taught at the Faculty of Art and Architecture at the Technical University in Liberec.

Pavel Halík began to form his view of architectural development in the mid-1960s, at the moment when Czech (and understandably as well Czechoslovak) architecture had already fully rejoined the mainstream of international Modernism. Halík always spoke with respect about his modernist teachers. His wonderful later overview of Le Corbusier’s canonical Towards a New Architecture formed his tribute to the founding generation of modern architecture. No less of a worthy act was his thorough and trenchant analysis of the forced interruption of modern development through the imposition of historicist Socialist Realism, which he included in his discussion of Czech architecture in the 1950s (in his History of Czech Fine Art, vol. 5). All the same, his evaluation of modernism, particularly in its urbanistic manifestations, was critical even before the Czech profession began to register the echoes of postmodernist theories. His characterisation of modern urban design as a composition of masses in an open, neutral space drew attention to the weakening of the identity of specific localities, of the perception of urban situations from a human perspective, and of their social and cultural significances (as he first formulated in articles published in the present journal). These forgotten aspects were, in turn, found in Christian Norberg-Schulz’s Genius Loci, which he helped, with the present author, to translate into Czech. (This joint effort, paradoxically, was initially circulated in samizdat, thanks to its significantly un-Marxist conception, until in the 1990s it could finally appear as a printed book.)

Pavel Halík further expanded his ideas of urban form in later publications, such as his volume Architektura a město (Architecture and the City) from 1996 or his university textbook Morfologie města (Morphology of the City). For me, it was an honour to work with him in these publications, as much as on the Czech translation of Kenneth Frampton’s Modern Architecture – A Critical History, or his reflections on recent domestic work in his book Česká architektura 1989 – 1999 (Czech Architecture 1989-1999). Additionally, Halík was the author of dozens of expert reviews of recently completed buildings published throughout Czech-language architectural journals. His interpretations and evaluations were invariably exceptional in the precision of their formal analysis and in their ability to see a building in its wider context, whether of cultural development or its immediate urban situation. His deep knowledge of the history of modern architecture allowed him to uncover connections across time and offer a fitting diagnosis of the place of the building being evaluated within the coordinates of international architectural work. In his writings on contemporary architecture, we find few harsh condemnations: he tended to choose the objects of his interest to reveal positive starting points, since architecture was a matter that he loved and whose fate was close to his heart. Pavel Halík lived for architecture, for thinking and talking about it. As such, our public architectural debates will greatly miss his views and voice.

Petr Kratochvíl

www.unplanedcity.sav.sk

Bratislava has been formed by the ideas of Modernism. More than two thirds of its current area has been built in the course of the past one hundred years based on modern architectural and urban planning principles. However, these concepts have only been implemented to a limited extent or in a manner that differed from the authors’ intentions. To a great extent, the reasons for this discrepancy between planning and implementation lie in the social and political changes which the city faced in the past century, as well as in the conflicts of interest of local actors and state administrations and their ideas regarding the forming of the city as national or regional center. The example of the planning and development of Bratislava in the past century is not unique in the European context. On the contrary, to a certain extent it can serve as a model example of the transformation of new centers of successor countries of the former Habsburg monarchy, as well as other European cities.

The aim of the international conference entitled (Un)planned City is to present these apparently contradictory and paradoxical tendencies in the planning of European cities. Contributions address the broad theme of organized planning and spontaneity in the development of modern cities, not only from the perspective of the history of urbanism, urban planning and architecture, but also from a wider interdisciplinary perspective, touching on philosophy, sociology, political science, geography and anthropology. Studies of specific cities and sites, as well as contributions dedicated to the methodological and theoretical aspects of this topic are welcome. The conference will also attempt to provide space for discussion regarding new possibilities in the presentation and analysis of knowledge on urbanism through interdisciplinary approaches and the use of new technology.

The online conference is organized by the Department of Architecture at the Historical Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences (SAV) in the framework of research project APVV-16-0584 Unintentional City: Architectonic and Urbanistic Conceptions of the 19th and 20th Centuries in the Urban Structure of Bratislava.

A&U Talks, February 27. 2020, 7 pm, Artforum, Kozia 20, Bratislava

Aktuálne vydanie časopisu Architektúra & urbanizmus mapuje vplyvy výpočtových technológii a digitalizácie architektonických nástrojov na súčasnú architektonickú prax a výskum (nielen) v strednej Európe. Editori čísla Imro Vaško a Shota Tsikoliya v predstavia spektrum výskumov a projektov, ktoré s a nezameriavajú len na možnosti použitia výpočtových nástrojov, ale ktoré by bez nich vôbec nemohli vzniknúť, či by prinajmenšom vyzerali úplne inak. V diskusii so šéfredaktorkou časopisu Henrietou Moravčíkovou sa pokúsia objasniť, ako súčasné poňatie sveta, ako otvoreného dynamického systému, mení architektonické uvažovanie. Dotknú sa otázok, ako napríklad, čo znamenajú v dnešnom architektonickom výskume a praxi otvorené systémy, mäkké systémy, generatívne procesy či bottom-up metódy a aký je ich potenciál pre rozšírenie poznania a riešenia reálnych výziev nášho sveta.