Suburbanization processes in the hinterland of Bratislava represent one of the most significant socio-spatial transformations in the post-socialist history of Slovakia. The trend of settlement decentralisation within the dynamically growing metropolitan region contrasts in many ways with the settlement development of the period of state socialism, during which centrally controlled and planned settlement transformation and […]
Tag: Bratislava
The Anatomy of Privatization: The Genealogy and Practice of Postsocialist Transformation of Housing in Bratislava
The general story of ECE cities in the era of transformation is well known. What began in the course of the 1980s as an endeavour to make cities more liveable, humane and ecological, ended up in a massive privatization at some point in the 1990s. Mostly this development has been explained by social geographers, sociologists […]
The Parks of Culture and Leisure in Prague and Bratislava: The Story of a Transition
The article will focus on a critical re-evaluation of approaches to the city in the period of late normalization; especially on the new ethos that took place in the professional community as a result of postmodern ideas coming from Western Europe, but also thanks to the extremely negative experience of the highly modernist industrialization of […]
The Trade Union House / Istropolis: The Birth and Liquidation of an Innovative Generator of Social Life, Culture, and Education
Issue:
2021, Volume 55, No. 3 - 4
Bratislava’s former Trade Union House [Dom odborov], renamed after 1989 Istropolis, is the largest cultural and social complex in Slovakia. During the past two years, it has been at the centre of unexpected public attention. The reason for this interest lay in the circumstances surrounding its change in ownership, reduction of use, followed by the […]
Red or Blue? The Start of Modern Planning in Bratislava
Issue:
2017, Volume 51, No. 1 - 2
This study presents the history of modern urban planning in Bratislava (then Pozsony/Pressburg) at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. It identifies the first three plans for regulation and enlargement of the city: the plan by the City Technical Division from 1898 through 1906, the plan of the retired construction commissioner of Hungarian […]
Notes on the Bratislava Activities of the Architect Emil Brüll´s Construction Company
Issue:
2016, Volume 50, No. 1 - 2
The architect Emil Brüll was a member of the group of Slovakia’s Jewish architects who died or were executed during WW II. He worked in Bratislava, mostly in the 1920s and 1930s. This contribution aims to clarify and complete our information about his work. Many buildings that have been the subject of study for architecture […]
Planning the Unplanned City: Modern Urban Conceptions in a Traditional Urban Structure
Issue:
2015, Volume 49, No. 3 - 4
In our thinking about the city and about city regulations, land-use and/or spatial planning, several independent lines of argument have emerged. One of them is the artistic-compositional stance, derived from the traditional central principle of architectonic creation, focusing on the production of an aesthetically pleasing functional-structural whole. This result has the character of an inclusive […]
The New Bratislava of Josef Marek
Issue:
2017, Volume 51, No. 3 - 4
The study represents the urban-planning work of the relatively unknown Moravian-born architect Josef Marek, a pupil of Jan Kotěra and a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. During his years in Slovakia after 1919 up until the end of the 1950s, Marek created an entire series of urban plans, though the form […]
The Greater Bratislava of Architects Alois Balán and Jiří Grossmann
Issue:
2019, Volume 53, No. 1 - 2
The declaration of Bratislava as Slovakia’s capitol opened a new chapter in its urban development. In reflecting on the new city, a significant contribution was made by the visions of architects Alois Balán and Jiří Grossmann, as the only ones consistently presenting the urban program of Greater Bratislava. The present study presents the intellectual genesis […]
Bratislava the (Un)Planned City: the Impact of 20th Century Urban Planning on the Urban Structure of the Slovak Capital
Issue:
2019, Volume 53, No. 3 - 4
Bratislava is a characteristic example of a city decisively shaped by the ideas of the 20th century. Over two-thirds of its current area was built in the spirit of the principles of modern architecture and urban planning across the 20th century. Yet these town planning or architectonic conceptions, paradoxically, largely formulated the urban structure of […]
Creative Transformations: the Campus Paradigm
Issue:
2020, Volume 54, No. 1 - 2
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 Experts in the Building of Post-Stalinist Bratislava
Issue:
2020, Volume 54, No. 1 - 2
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 […]