The Athenaeum

The Athenaeum is an architectural genre adopted in the wake of Romania’s extensive and accelerated processes of modernization at the end of the 19th century. Like many other civilizational forms of the West, it was introduced to span the developmental gap after the nation’s long Ottoman rule and emphasize the new direction towards humanistic values […]

Teasing Identity: Narratives of the Communist Bloc

IDENTITY PREDICAMENTS – IN GENERAL AND IN THE FORMER COMMUNIST BLOC Identity is a matter of both reflection and representation.In the first circumstance, it is assumed to draw an accurate, trustworthy portrait, while in the second it is called upon to create a meaningful, powerful image. But what kind of portrait? Should it follow the […]

Reception and Architectural Interpretation: The Television Tower and Hotel Ještěd and The Prague-Žižkov Television Tower

The paper focuses on the problem of the public or architectural interpretation and reception of two extraordinary buildings: the combined hotel and television tower on Mt. Ještěd near Liberec and the Žižkov Television Tower in Prague. The paper is divided into three chapters: 1) Architecture and the Historic Context, 2) Architecture and the Topological (Landscape […]