Architektúra & Urbanizmus – JOURNAL
The journal publishes research results in the fields of architecture and urban planning.
The present text is a continual reaction to the increasingly free understanding of the idea of “design” and its justification. Design and its reflections are faced with a wide range of methodological problems, ensuing from the essential character of the subject of discussion, which is not helped in the least by linguistic codification. The English […]
In 1707, the year in which the Act of Union between the Scottish and English crowns formally constituted the kingdom of Great Britain, the population of Scotland stood at around one million, a sixth of the whole. By then, driven initially by the post-Reformation Calvinist church, Scotland’s renowned education system was already established. Allied to […]
Bratislava, like other regional centres of the former Hungarian Kingdom, experienced extensive construction development at the end of the 19th century. As a result of its historical traditions, the town had a special status within the country. While the question remains open for future cultural and historical research as to whether efforts to build the […]
In March of 2012, after two years of restoration, the renowned Villa Tugendhat was opened once again to visitors. After over eight decades, it is now possible to see the house in the condition that it enjoyed shortly after its construction in 1930. Thanks to recent research findings regarding the wider context of its urban […]
Modern Tradition and Liturgy The Ways of Modernism in Hungarian Church Architecture in 20th Century Hungarian church architecture of the 20th century accurately reflects the European historical and artistic development processes of the given period. Though this century was typified by its enriching of the region by presenting the values of individuality, at several points […]
Art Looks at Mass-housing Mass-housing has become an oft-employed motif in the art of the last decades: photographs, videos, installations, movies, and literature have all made a significant place for the urbanity represented by large prefabricated housing blocks. Revealed or transfigured through the artistic gaze, mass-housing conveys a series of questions about politics, society and, […]
A common lament about the legacy of communism in Europe is the damage that it did to the built environment. Particular ire is directed at the concrete prefabricated housing blocks, known in Czech and Slovak as paneláks (structural panel buildings), groups of which were arranged in housing estates (sídliště in Czech and sídlisko in Slovak) […]
Cumbernauld New Town, widely regarded as the most ambitious of the second generation of planned New Towns in the UK, was designated in 1955 with an initial target population of 50,000, was begun in 1957, and was largely built during the 1960s and ‘70s. Yet despite being internationally acclaimed – receiving the prestigious American Institute […]
In 1990 a newsreel which documented the emergence of new types of services arising after the fall of socialism in Poland showed a private company working on a security scheme for the Przyczółek Grochowski Housing Estate in Warsaw. Bending over the plan of meandering buildings, the guards tried to establish effective procedures for protecting the […]
The article presents, documents, and analyzes the housing mega-blocks in the centre of New Belgrade (Serbia). Constructed in the socialist period, the blocks form the core of the new modern city and provide housing for some 50,000 inhabitants. In the six decades since its inception, this complex of modernist mass housing constructed on the marshy […]
Living and construction, a historical background for large-scale housing in Denmark Between the wars, Copenhagen was strongly affected by the urbanisation that had begun with the industrialisation of the city in the middle of the 18th century. The city consisted of overcrowded areas with a mixture of buildings for accommodation and for businesses, both in […]
Mass housing and the Alternatives in the Soviet Period in Tallinn The story of Soviet mass housing is generally well known – including Khrushchev’s enthusiasm for the establishment of industrial building practices in the second half of the 1950s, the striking contrast between the prefabricated housing developments and earlier academic Stalinist buildings, and the uniformity […]
A special area of post-1945 mass housing was the type-planning of homes, especially in socialist countries where the compulsory use of standardized projects was implemented to simplify the production of new housing within the centrally planned economy. The changes in the floor plans of Hungarian standardized housing closely reflect the alterations of the domestic political […]
The mass housing project of the Cité de la Muette in Drancy, near Paris This article deals with the pre-war Cité de la Muette at Drancy, in the suburbs of Paris, as one of the key harbingers leading to the international post-war phenomenon of mass social housing. It constitutes a reflection on the clash between […]
The present study analyses the circumstances of the construction, and the urban, architectural and structural qualities of the Bratislava residential colonies of Unitas and N ová doba, two of the most important works of ‘left-wing architectural Functionalism’ in Slovakia. In addition, it aims to present the social situation in the era along with the professional […]
The settled life-style in the first centres of civilisation had to satisfy new needs for safe and functional structures regarding town plans, as well as dwelling organisation within restricted a fortified. The street network logically influenced the rectangular plans of houses and monumental buildings like temples, ziggurats and pyramids. Similarly, the water supply and sewage […]
The Kuffner family mausoleum in Sládkovičovo (1926) and the mausoleum in the village of Pomáz near Budapest (1912) are the only realized sepulchral structures from the exceptionally extensive work of M. M. Harminc. Despite their subtle character, they reflect the diversity of their creator’s typological range and stylistic adaptability, in an interesting manner complementing his […]
In the entire architectural history of Slovakia, itis possible to find only a few works by architects of such international reputation as Peter Behrens. His Neolog Synagogue in Žilina is viewed by historians, preservationists and even the public at large primarily through the prism of the architect’s personal fame. Nonetheless, the present synagogue is not […]
With the partitions of Poland by the end of the 18th century, the Russian Empire acquired a large number of Jewish subjects territorially confined to the limits of the Pale of Settlement, an area comprising mainly the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. From that time on, both the Tsarist and Soviet regimes looked for solutions to the […]
The present article describes the life, work and ideas of the architect, urban planner, university teacher and theorist of urban and regional planning, Emanuel Hruška. The first part deals briefly with his biography and work (pointing out some lesser-known and forgotten works of his), the next part is focused on environmentally friendly concepts and ideas […]
Czechoslovak architecture during the “Golden Sixties” of the 20th century is interpreted by contemporary historians as a very important phase in the history of our modern architecture. In the postwar development of Czechoslovak modern architecture, this decade can even be seen as a time of very radical change – from the political isolation of the […]
In the immediate post-war years, modern architecture characterized the Hungarian scene: key positions of architectural practice and state construction administration were occupied by advocates of modern architecture of whom several were also active participants of the Modern movement. This trend was soon interrupted with a short but highly forceful period (ca 1950 – 1955) of […]
“All [of these countries] seem to be governed by the same principle of the identity crisis, of the conflictive absorption of contradictory cultural waves, of a provincial model, low-keyed, but haunted by failure and lack of perspective. All seem to struggle between the majoritarian indifference and the elite’s schizophrenia, all seem to have something in […]
The complex of the Slovak National Gallery (SNG) is the outcome of complicated developments in the city structure, in which the most valuable urban advantage is its position on the Danube embankment and in the city centre. From námestie Ľudovíta Štúra up to Riečná ulica, the entire block is a conglomeration of widely varying historic […]
South of the historic medieval core of Košice, only a few hundred meters from its edge, along ulica Rastislavova across from the Slovak Television complex that also once belonged to the same military installation, there stood a complex of military warehouses, long, empty and hidden behind a brick wall. Its massive cubic volumes created a […]
This year will mark forty years since Ještěd Mountain Hotel and Television Tower first opened to great fanfare. A national cultural monument, built on the site of an old historical building that had burned down, the tower is a reflection of several currents in society at the time of its construction: the political thaw in […]
The interwar period was an era of unprecedented building development in the area of the High Tatra mountains, at a time when the regional architecture was prepared to accept the experiments imported from the Czech architectonic scene. These avant-garde and indeed extravagant contemporary efforts have resulted in an architectonically unusual legacy of several valuable and […]
The Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) from 1928 to 1959 was an unconventional working group and a complex laboratory of progressive ideas for the design of the city. Over three decades, CIAM united architects, town planners, artists, historians, sociologists and journalists. Its writings on the ‘Functional City’ in particular were considered the core of modern […]