Obituary of Doc. Ing. Arch. Pavel Halík, CSc.

On June 21, 2021, historian and theory of architecture theorist, educator, and translator, longtime collaborator of this magazine (A+U, ed. note) and our dear friend, Associate Professor Ing. Arch. Pavel Halík, CSc., passed away at the age of almost 86. He was born in 1935 in Stržanov, near Žďár nad Sázavou and its famous Santini pilgrimage church of St. John of Nepomuk. He visited Santini's church during his childhood with his parents and even served as an altar boy there during Mass, as he later enjoyed recounting. However, his lifelong theme became not the Baroque but modern and contemporary architecture, and in the early years of his research career, even more so modern urbanism. It was probably one of his professors at the Faculty of Architecture at ČVUT in Prague, urbanist Jindřich Krise, who directed him towards this interest, with whom he later worked as an assistant at the school after graduation. Pavel Halík did not choose the career of a practicing architect; his thoughtful nature led him to theoretical reflection on the field, to penetrating analyses of both domestic and global creations. His passion was discussions, not only about architecture but also about a wide range of culture and art, where he was as knowledgeable a connoisseur as in his own field. In the mid-1960s, Pavel Halík joined the multidisciplinary department of the Cabinet of Theory of Architecture of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, which, after several twists and turns, became part of the Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences (AV ČR), where he worked until the new millennium. His teaching career paradoxically began during a three-year stay in Oran, Algeria. In the early 1990s, he began teaching at the AVU School of Architecture, lectured at summer schools of urbanism in Paris, and later, until 2019, taught at the Faculty of Art and Architecture of the Technical University in Liberec.
Pavel Halík began to shape his views on the development of architecture in the mid-1960s, at a time when Czech – and, of course, simultaneously Czechoslovak – architecture had fully re-engaged in the modern stream. Pavel Halík always spoke with respect of his modernist teachers. His later excellent overview of the canonical Le Corbusier book For a New Architecture was his tribute to the founding generation of modern architecture. Likewise, his thorough and scathing analysis of the forced interruption of modern development here due to historicist socialism, which he incorporated into his treatise on Czech architecture of the 1950s (in the History of Czech Visual Arts, vol. 5), was a commendable act. Nevertheless, his assessment of modernism, especially in its urban expressions, was critical, even before the echoes of postmodern theories reached us. His characterization of modern urbanism as the composition of masses in free neutral space pointed to the weakening identity of specific places as perceived from a human perspective and their social and cultural meanings (as he first formulated in articles published precisely in this magazine). He found these overlooked aspects in Christian Norberg-Schulz's book Genius Loci, in whose translation he participated. (This joint translation of ours, paradoxically, due to its non-Marxist conception, first circulated as samizdat before it could be published officially in the 1990s.)
Pavel Halík then developed his urbanistic reflections in other publications, such as the book Architecture and the City from 1996 or the script Morphology of the City. It was an honor for me to collaborate with him on them, as well as on the translation of Kenneth Frampton's book Modern Architecture - Critical Histories, or on the reflection of domestic creation in the book Czech Architecture 1989 – 1999. Pavel Halík was also the author of dozens of professional reviews of recently completed buildings, published in our architectural magazines. His interpretations and evaluations always stood out for their precision in formal analysis and the ability to see a building in the broader context of both cultural development and specific urban situations. His deep insight into the history of modern architecture allowed him to find connections across time and accurately diagnose the place of the evaluated building within the coordinates of international creation. In his texts on contemporary architecture, we would probably not find many harsh condemnations; he chose his objects of interest in such a way as to point out positive perspectives, for he loved architecture and its fate was close to his heart. Pavel Halík lived architecture, thinking about it, and discussing it. Our public debate on architecture will therefore miss his opinion and voice greatly.