Theses 2019 - 3rd place

School: AAAD (Academy of Art, Architecture and Design in Prague)
Supervisor: Roman Brychta

The Atlas of emptiness functions together with three maps measuring 1.2 x 1.2 m as a guide through the empty landscape around Libavska. The designed route is marked on them with a bold red line. The atlas sees each of the approximately 240 locations connected by the route as small (and possibly insignificant) components in a larger and more important societal story. For each such location, whether it is drainage meliorations, solitary trees in fields, crosses, hedges, old or new ponds, but also abandoned dilapidated villages or Soviet bunkers, I add a commentary in the book. I try to place and explain these individual components into the story based on old maps or conversations with locals.
The proposed route passes through a landscape that I rename according to what it has become 70 years after the displacement. It begins in the Cultural Desert, where we are guided by collectivized massive fields, today chemically cultivated agricultural enterprises that emerged from Agricultural Cooperatives. The local soil lacks small creatures and essential nutrients that chemistry cannot indefinitely replace. The part named Bark Beetle Apocalypse leads us to clearings left behind in the forests destroyed by bark beetles and storms above the source of the Odra River. The spruce monoculture once retained a lot of water, but today the missing trees cannot prevent evaporation from the soil, and the spring of the main river is gradually thinning out. In the chapter Remnants of Hedges, the route encounters a few remnant groves and hedges that locals built over generations and which heavy machinery failed to plow under. In the section End of the World, the book tells sad stories of municipalities and their inhabitants who found themselves in the military training area later occupied by the Soviet Army in the late 1940s. Here, one can see Soviet-abandoned military facilities as well as the remarkable town of Město Libavá, where urbanism was rationally managed only by the army. The journey concludes with the typically Sudeten Valley of Cottages and Campsites, which attracted city dwellers for recreation as a depopulated area after the expulsion of the Germans.