Vladímír Dedeček: Work - Invitation to Film Screening

ARCHITECTURE IS HERE! VLADIMÍR DEDEČEK: WORK
4 / 12 / 2015 – 15 / 1 / 2016
PRAGUE/Forum for Architecture and Media, Husova 18, Brno

Opening 4/12/2015 at 19h

We cordially invite you to the opening of an authorial video installation focused on the works and architectural concepts of one of the most significant post-war (Czech) Slovak architects – Vladimír Dedeček (1929).
During his nearly half-century career, Vladimír Dedeček created more than ninety architectural realizations and designs – from family homes to extensive complexes of universities and cultural institutions, revealing the resilience of his nature, as well as a clear and consistent approach to design. The "Dedeček" handwriting is characterized by an emphasis on rhythm and almost sculptural plasticity, which, however, never exceeded the clarity of basic geometric shapes – he always remained true to the modern concept.
The original exhibition project, initiated by architectural historian Peter Szalay (Department of Architecture of ÚSTARCH SAV) and architect Martin Zaiček (o.z. Archimera), was realized in collaboration with graphic designer Lubica Segečová, artist Peter Kudlička (moire.sk), and Plural architects (Martin Jančok, Michal Janák, and Ivana Čobejová) and has already been exhibited in a number of venues and cities (Bratislava, Berlin, and most recently Prague).
In Brno, the project is presented in a different form. A central part of the presentation becomes a video interview, whose authors renounce artistic-historical descriptiveness, nor do they draw on the attractive visuality of Vladimír Dedeček's iconic buildings. On the contrary, they mediate the intimacy of the architect's current living environment, his thinking, and a look into the past and present. The camera is solely directed at the architect, his face, hands, and worktable. Nevertheless, Vladimír Dedeček is not just a traditional passive narrator here; he physically demonstrates the way he works in front of the camera, revealing his resilient nature, as well as his clear and consistent approach to designing. Simple, schematic pen drawings that the architect created during this specific video interview visualize the reality of the architect's thoughts. The authors did not aim to provide an exhaustive retrospective of Vladimír Dedeček's work; they rather wanted to outline a picture of the architect's personality and, through his own words, provide space for the unveiling and understanding of his creation. The project Vladimír Dedeček: WORK is thus a probe into the architect's thinking, whose work continues to resonate vividly in architectural discourse and significantly shapes the space and identity of cities today.
PRAGUE/Forum for Architecture and Media presents the video installation as part of its long-term project CONSONANCE OF MODERNITY (curators Jaroslav Sedlák and Šárka Svobodová), within which the possibilities of mediating the architecture of the second half of the 20th century and the context of its emergence to the wider public are explored. The film material is placed in a new situation by members of the Brno collective 4AM. In an installation of white plastic soup bowls that frames the dual-channel film, they react to one of Dedeček's realizations (the Technical University in Zvolen), where the architect solved the acoustic ceiling of the hall in the same way. At the same time, the aim of this installation is to reflect the creative processes of architects and artists applied in public buildings during the previous regime, when the limited offer of serial interior products often became a source of new qualities and a celebration of ordinary objects.

Selected quotes from architect Vladimír Dedeček:

About his work...
“I do not see myself as an inventor of ideas; everything that is in my architecture can be found in a textbook of descriptive geometry, you just have to leaf through it carefully.”

About the declaration of SPU in Nitra as a National Cultural Monument...
“I perceive architecture as a national work in general. But not a nation in a national socialist or political sense, but a nation as a people, as the inhabitants of one territory between the Danube and the Carpathians. (...) What is a National Cultural Monument? It is what this nation, or if you like, the people create, because a concept alone is not enough; a concept is paper, at best a model. I feel like the author of the basic idea, but of my own school. Everyone brought their bit to the mill there. With errors, with good things, so it is justified if a nation says – this is my property and my work. I feel, of course, a certain satisfaction, but I do not think that the papers built that school by themselves. There were thousands of hands that were Slovak, Hungarian, Jewish, and also Romani.”

About interior design and collaboration with architect Jaroslav Němec...
“Together with Jaro Němec, we had the label that we were architects designing buildings in which there is a monastic environment, that we design houses that are externally complicatedly shaped and internally simple. But that was not our programmatic belief, even though sometimes I pushed Jaro towards greater simplicity. I had a principle that an ordinary student must sit the same way as a director or a teacher, and there is no reason for one to sit on a chair and the other on a stool.
We consciously tried for simplicity; we preferred to use money on stone facades rather than spending it on “tinted” interiors. Today you have facades clad with "junk," but inside they are "tinted." In my opinion, a building should be built to last centuries, and the interior, that will change anyway every ten years. So why spend so much money on it?”

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