Category: Scientific Study

After fifteen years of helping Angola’s decolonization struggle, in 1976 Yugoslav Committee for Technical Assistance came to Luanda, to negotiate the technical assistance to Angolan people. They had discovered the factory of the IMS Žeželj housing technology, brought in 1975 by Cubans – one of three facilities Yugoslavia had delivered to Cuba during 1960s, and […]

From Modernism to Today: Reading Urban Planning Approaches to the Turkish Capital Ankara

The city of Ankara, with its own conception of the modernity of the Republic of Turkey separate from the old city, is one of the national capital cities designed as a new city and a pioneer of modern urban planning of the 20th century. The city of Ankara is discussed in this article as it […]

Afghanistan – No Place for Independent (Urban) Plans?

In the period of the 1970s and 1980s, many international experts worked in Algeria and other African states. Among them were urbanists and architects from Slovakia, who mostly worked for the institution CNERU (Centre National d´Études et de Réalisations en Urbanisme), involving work in several cities such as Bedjaia, Blida, Colea, Sétife etc. These experts […]

Slovak Architects and Algerian Cities in the 1970s and 1980s – Historic Heritage, French Urban Planning and Czecho-Slovak Urban Interventions

Export/Import of Modern Town Planning Principles

Urban planning of the 20th century, especially in countries under authoritarian regimes, has left behind significant traces in the urban environment as well as in the countriesʼ landscapes. It wasa turbulent period when the policies of often-shifting political orders could easily change from one day to the next, along with the preferred approaches of urban […]

The Power of Experts: Continuities or Ruptures before and after 1989

MICHAL KOPEČEK (ED.)ARCHITEKTI DLOUHÉZMĚNY EXPERTNÍ KOŘENYPOSTSOCIALISMUV ČESKOSLOVENSKU2019, Praha: Argo, 374 s.ISBN 9788025728086

Pattern Recognition

ÉVA LOVRAVÁROSOK AZ OSZTRÁK-MAGYARMONARCHIÁBAN VÁROSSZÖVETÉSVÁROSTIPOLÓGIA 1867 – 19182019, Budapest: TercISBN 9786155445651

The legacy – Ignasi Solà-Morales and the contemporary urban debate

The present paper, encompasses theoretical reflections on urban condition;as well as new possibilities for the transformations of the contemporary city.The debate on the contemporary urban condition is undoubetebly today composed of multiple thoughts, namely the organization of the city as a network, its characteristic impermanence, the ubiquity of vision, mobility and digital communications, and so […]

Creative Transformations: the Campus Paradigm

Large swaths of land on the fringe of metropolis are now undergoing transformation into a landscape of big boxes devoted to storage, logistics, or manufacture. On the other hand, close to specific cities, such as Paris or Moscow, strengthening support of the innovation economy has fueled the rise of research and development sites. Often simply […]

Urban Planning and Construction of the Interwar City of Uzhhorod: Mission Interrupted

After Uzhhorod became the administrative centre of Subcarpathian Ruthenia, the city gained a unique privilege – to become its capital at the time of development of modernism. The administrative and residential part Maly Galagov, which was created as a result of the gradual implementation of the main regulatory plan from 1920–1923, became the new core […]

The Parliament for Prague – Proposals, Competitions and Debates on its Location and Architecture

Prague. The metropolis of the Czech lands and since 1918 also the capital of independent Czechoslovakia. As such, it has often become a place for ambitious architectural and urban visions, which did not always materialize. Since the end of the 19th century, one of the most discussed locations in Prague has been the Letná Plain, […]

The Komensky Street in Kosice –The Story of an Avenue of the 20th Century

Regulatory plans of the city of Kosice as we know them today were first being created at the end of World War I. The plans are bound to important political events such as changes in state formations, post war reconstruction, transition from capitalism to socialism, forced socialist industrialization and various forms of socialist establishment until […]

Planning of Bohemian regional centres in the period of their industrialisation and modernisation: Pilsen and Hradec Králové

Almost all towns in Central Europe north of the Danube were laid by a planned foundation, mostly in the 12th to 14th centuries. They retained the original extent and spatial structure until the industrial revolution. Only then some of them faced the challenge of unpreceded growth. So that this growth could be managed, city administrations […]

Re-Shaping Budapest: Large Housing Estates and their (Un)Planned Centers

The core of the theoretical reflection is the modern large housing estate as a spatial unit, its subdivision, and center. The comparative study presents Budapest’s 15 large housing estates (with more than 6000 dwellings) realized during the two 15-year mass housing programs between 1960 and 1990. That time, most of the urban land was publicly […]

Urban Experts in the Building of Post-Stalinist Bratislava

The vast majority of research dedicated to Czechoslovak urban history focuses either on history of ideas (expert visions, debates and projects) or on the final outcomes of urban planning and construction (mostly the realized housing estates). In order to historicize building and governing socialist city in the late 1950s, 1960 and early 1970s, this paper […]

British Urban Reconstruction after the Second World War: The Rise of Planning and the Issue of “Non-Planning”

The period from 1940 to the mid 1950s has been widely referred to as a critical period in UK planning, with new legislation, official guidance, and hundreds of plans of all scales produced in the aftermath of wartime destruction. The circumstances of war seemed to favour a top-down, expert-driven process. If this was the high-point […]

Mapping with care as an outline for post neoliberal architecture methodologies – tools of the Never-never school

Modernist planning brought us a tradition of producing top-down utopian blueprints of the ideal habitat for the modern man. Decades later, we still heavily practice this tabula rasa planning: importing ready-made images and concepts to fill in seemingly empty places; while the ambition (or necessity) to vision other radical worlds has been significantly weakened by […]

Urbanization Outside the City Interwar Housing in the Bratislava Suburb Kramáre

The work is devoted to the period of the urbanization and expansion of the city of Bratislava in the direction of the suburbs in the first third of the 20th century. It deals with the quality of pre-urban inter-war architecture and the share of Czech architects and builders in its origin. While the architectural ideas […]

The Archi-Tectonics of the INTEGRO Long-Span Skeletal System. The Concept of an Open Architectural Form Represented by the Series of Prior Department Store

The long-span concrete prefabricated skeletal system ŠPÚO-ZIPP was originally intended for the construction of Prior department stores in Slovakia, and later was used as a universal open modular system for a wide range of buildings under the name INTEGRO. Using the example of three department stores, the study offers arguments why, from the point of […]

The Interpretation of Architecture as a Methodological Problem

In this essay we hope to address a few methodological issues in interpreting a work of architecture that have gradually shown themselves to be problematic and at the same time productive. If we accept interpretation as one possible approach to an architectural work, then the fundamental issue of interpretation becomes the question of the sense […]

The Beauty of the New Modern Life and Technology The Survival of Socialist Architecture in the Budapest City Centre

Based on the narrowing lists of three Budapest architectural guides (1980, 1997, 2014) of buildings completed 1945-1990, the paper intends to discover the reasons for their survival, changes or demolishing. It concentrates on the story of three office buildings built after 1960. The analysis proves that the two demolished buildings not only lost their tangible […]

Environmental Ideas Coopted: ARARAT Exhibition, Stockholm, 1976

On 2 April 1976, the ARARAT exhibition opened at the main museum of contemporary art in Stockholm, the Moderna Museet. Its ambiguous biblical name was taken from the acronym for Alternative Research in Architecture, Resources, Art and Technology, an interdisciplinary research group formed by architects, planners, engineers, biologists and artists. Four years previously, the celebration […]

Sarajevo Memories – the City of Sublime Disorder

The development of cities as well as collective memory is not a linear process, but one strongly related to the ever-changing dynamics of time and space. The manner in which urban tissue evolves through anticipated events, or is disrupted by unforeseen, often chaotic happenings, comes together in a myriad of networks that generate different levels […]

Housing Production and Energy Use in Greece Insights from History and New Social Challenges

The outbreak of the Greek debt crisis in 2010 sparked considerable discussion on domestic energy consumption in Greece. In combination with austerity measures, the economic recession has led to rising unemployment, falling incomes, the rollback of the welfare state and increased taxation burdens, especially on private property.2 Financial constraints, coupled with rising fuel prices as […]

Alice Masaryková: Patron of the Arts at the Prague Castle

The study explores the extent of Alice Masaryk’s patronage in the following aspects: 1) art pieces donated by Alice to the Prague Castle collection, 2) Alice Masaryková’s cooperation with architect Josip Plečnik on the reconstruction of the Presidential Suite in Prague Castle and finally, 3) her participation in the creation of the presidential collection of […]

The Roman Catholic Church of St. Anna in Oravská Lesná

The study deals with the architecture of the Church of St. Anna in Oravská Lesná. After a description of the troubles connected with the planning and building of the new church, a short biography is provided of the architect, Oszkár Láczay-Fritz. Information on the construction of the church is then followed by a description of […]

Did a Steindl School Exist ? The Members of the Design and Technical Management Team of the Parliament in Budapest

The architects’ office (involving architects, draftsmen, planners, foremen) of the Parliament in Budapest, led by Imre Steindl, existed between 1885 and 1902. In the first part of our essay, our aim is to publish further information based on the historical findings of the research performed regarding the office’s members, the circumstances of their joining and […]

The Buildings Built For Public Use by “The KKK Group” In Croatia: Architecture, Structure and Conservation