Ještěd in the Cage 06 - Jury Feedback

Marie Davidová
I was very pleased to be invited to the JFK jury and I was happy to come. I have a personal connection to the Liberec School of Architecture. I am glad that the school maintains a high standard in Czech terms and all the projects were generally of good quality. The students and teachers did a very good job. I would like to highlight the politically engaged research studio of Jiří Klokočka, Jiří Janďourek, and Zdena Zedníčková, which addressed the urban plan for the city of Liberec. This initiative shows how directly an architecture school can benefit the society and locality in which it is situated. The jury unanimously agreed to award this studio, despite its fairly diverse composition. Very well-prepared projects by Michaela Dlouhá, Andrea Tůmová, and Lenka Pechanová appeared here, who were not afraid of experimentation.
I was personally very pleased with the environmental design studio, where students deal with the currently significant question of environmental architecture. The projects were interesting, and I think it is very good that such a studio exists at the school. Unfortunately, I got the impression that the other studios learn little from this and do not engage much with environmental issues. Greater interdisciplinary collaboration would be beneficial. Perhaps for this reason, students often design projects for locations they do not know and do not visit. This seems to me to be a fundamental problem.
The studio of Zdeněk Fránek was also sympathetic, focusing on baroque landscapes and displaying beautiful models. Otherwise, the studios mostly issue assignments based on typology instead of presenting a specific theme in architecture that the given instructor is engaged with, such as "Complexity and System Thinking" or "Tectonics." Presentations, with the exception of perhaps one by Zuzka Procházková with a beautiful project of a tensegrity structure, reveal only the outcome and rarely hint at the working process behind it. I see this as problematic from both an academic perspective, where the design process is essential, and from the perspective of readiness for practice, where the architect must be able to explain to the client why the proposed design is what it is. Students do not provide references, which raises what I hope is a misleading impression that the topic was not explored at all. I would like to see more experimentation in the projects, which once used to be a strong point of the school.
However, all these critiques are overshadowed by the high standard of work produced, and I look forward to future exhibitions!

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Mária Topolčanská

house after fire
stairs to heaven kladno
fire above london
revitalization of the beach by the pond
liberec shattering sleeping
barrier-free monastery
parasitic DIY landscape
circular shelter without doors
house for three sisters
chapel of low tide
instant playground in a powder

notes
This is not a poem. It is just a rather poetic list of projects that dropped out of my notes in the JFK jury than from my notes. I made a note of them in the first round of my confrontation with all the works. The first collection - regardless of the names of students and studios, just as I described the circle around the whole hall full of projects. Perhaps subconsciously, I chose only slightly post-apocalyptic designs. At that time, I did not know how my records would differ from those in the notebooks of my colleagues from the jury.

jury
I have been enjoying following the student-initiated JFK award from a distance since the beginning, so I eagerly accepted the invitation to the jury. Being in the jury was quite a trauma for me. I do not seek out activities where quality is determined by the opinion of the majority. I perceive things too individualistically; I prefer confrontation with the judgments of others rather than negotiating consensus, only as a last resort. It is almost irrelevant whether it is about architecture, music... And above all, I do not have that ability – and I am not currently longing to gain it – to quickly judge that something is complete nonsense and move on. With this impractical mental setup, I found myself in one place with dozens of student projects and with jury colleagues with their own beautiful notebooks.

freedom in a cage
Whenever there was a moment of agreement in the jury about the quality of an assignment from a certain studio, it was immediately not about which project grasped the assignment the best. This showed, I believe, the paradox of strong unifying assignments in the studios of Klokočka/Zedníčková _Janďourek and Fránek/Suchánek. Almost all of their outputs clearly exceeded the standard of other studios, but for the students themselves, the breadth (Liberec) and depth (baroque landscape) of the assignment were a certain handicap compared to some projects with a unique assignment. However, that paradox was certainly worth overcoming. Even though neither of those studios ultimately had a candidate for the main prize for a project (not even 2 jury members agreed on any after the discussion), it points to something essential. In strong competition under the pressure of shared rules, it is harder to stand out than in a dispersed quality – I believe this is one of the most useful personal exercises that the school can afford its students. It does not mean that strong and quality projects were not found in the other studios, just their occurrence was less frequent, and I think that is precisely why some stood out to more people.
Choosing an environment of condensed quality, where success must be pronounced, or dispersion, where even a small success stands out will always be a dilemma. Similarly in the school when choosing a studio with a shared well-prepared assignment, where student engagement is expected even beyond individual consultations with the teacher, as well as after graduation – it is the same dilemma as whether to expose oneself to the environment of the best architectural scenes or to stay in that domestic, much more intimate and always specific.
I think that the prestige of the Liberec school no longer needs to be borne solely on the shoulders of names known even from a distance - Suchomel, Fránek, Šípek... A few young assistants generating new challenges liberate them from this heavy burden (I know this objectively, as they are my friends). It is obviously a well-readable community of studio leaders and assistants without the hysteria of overly formal hierarchies (which I know, for instance, from the Bratislava technical university). For example, the model of the Liberec 2050 studio in the past semester approached maybe the ideal configuration – lead architect Jiří Klokočka guesting from the partner Belgian Sint-Lucas in a group with local assistants Zdeňka Zedníčková and Jiří Janďourek achieved quality in a different form and perhaps also in the rhythm of communication in the studio. One student (Lenka Pechanová) even managed to realize a small but great rebellion in it and at the end present her own voice (a thorough search for free spaces within the city) in confrontation with more radical projects that her fellow students proposed in teams of multiple students. I derive the greatest joy from such discoveries and meaningful escapes from the cages of studios, assignments, and schools.

price
The all-day intense conversation of the jury over the projects long lacked consensus. Agreement on a clean concept of a first-year student (Adam Lacina), still largely untainted by school, came really in the last minutes. Essentially, only at the moment when my colleague architect Petr Suske philosophically exclaimed, "a little humility, ladies!" The contradictions were perhaps rather gendered than generational, but I was very happy to undergo them. In a way, at least in the end, the jury found its chairperson, whom they considered unnecessary to elect at the beginning in hopes of a peaceful jury process, and at the same time, it prevented a disaster – several main prizes would have to be awarded immediately.