Villa Chytilová

The first major task of the School - the design of a chapel in Storsand, Norway (1969) - Emil Přikryl did not manage to seize. However, he shone in the second one. It was a design for a villa in Prague-Trója for one of the strongest personalities of the Czech New Wave cinema of the 1960s, the director Věra Chytilová. The creator of the unforgettable film Panelstory from 1985 reportedly formulated her request by stating that she did not want "either a cottage, or a bunker, or a transformer station." She was apparently referring to the nature of the rejected designs for her villa from the hands of famous Prague architects of the 1960s. The projects for Věra Chytilová's villa by students of the School SIAL, around the turn of 1969-1970, moved within a remarkable stylistic range, from machismo through abstract geometric architecture to surprisingly early postmodernism by Petr Vaďura, who in his drawing did not hesitate to revert to something resembling Jurkovič's or Kotěra's Art Nouveau from the early twentieth century. But the projects by Zdeněk Zavřel and Emil Přikryl also had the character of a distinct stylistic revival. In their simple, almost box-like volumes, pierced by strip windows, the tradition of interwar purism and functionalism was awakening to life. In the West, a group known as the New York Five had been moving in this direction since the mid-1960s. The simple geometric shapes of authentic purism and functionalism inspired them to reflect on the most fundamental properties