Tomáš Valena: Relationships. On the Bond to Place in Architecture

„A house built in a certain place enters into a dialogue with that place, in which both the house and the place participate equally. However, since each speaks its own language, it depends on the points of contact: both share their material and spatial dimensions. It is clear that communication between them will primarily take place in this dimension. It concerns the relationship of architecture to the place, a place addressed with a personal "You," the architecture of the relationship. This is surely not a new topic, but rather a well-known fact of architecture. Nevertheless, it is a fact that each generation of architects must be convinced of anew.“



The book Relationships. On the Bond to Place in Architecture was first published in German in 1994 and has become an important source of knowledge about the history of architecture and urban building from the perspective of the relationship between architectural work and physical place, architecture and topography. The topic of the physical environment of architecture, understood holistically as a cultural phenomenon, is increasingly relevant in the digital age. The book continues to attract readers' interest and in 2014, after twenty years, it was published in a second, supplemented and expanded edition, from which the Czech translation was made.



Tomáš Valena is one of the prominent Central European historians of architecture, known especially in the Czech context as an expert on the work of Josip Plečnik. The publishing house Zlatý řez now presents his seminal theoretical work to Czech readers, which deals with the relationship between architecture and physical place. The author first examines the concept of place itself, then reflects on various forms of "genius loci," and finally provides a historical overview of the dialogical relationship between architecture and place, not only in the European tradition. He shows how natural and landscape conditions influence the form of architectural works and how architecture, through careful reading of the place, helps people to settle into the world. This richly illustrated book combines high scholarly rigor with reader appeal.



About the Author 

Prof. Dr. Tomáš Valena was born in 1950 in Prague and has lived in Germany since the late 1960s. He studied philosophy, art history, architecture, and urbanism in Munich and at Cornell University in the United States. He led an architectural studio in Munich and realized a number of projects in the scale between architecture and urbanism. He taught at universities in Ithaca, Munich, and Ljubljana and is an emeritus professor of architectural design and urbanism at Hochschule in Munich. At the same time, he engages in scientific and journalistic activities, with his main areas of interest being architecture and topography, the relationship between architecture and urbanism, and the work of Josip Plečnik. As an author and architect, he prepared two major exhibitions (City and Topography 1990, Josip Plečnik – Architecture for a New Democracy, Prague Castle 1996, together with Zdeněk Lukeš and Damjan Prelovšek). In 2016, his extensive monograph About Plečnik: Contributions to the Study, Interpretation, and Popularization of His Work was published in Czech.



Tomáš Valena: Relationships. On the Bond to Place in Architecture. Translated from the German original Beziehungen. Über den Ortsbezug in der Architektur by Petr Kaška. Format 210 x 315 mm. Number of pages 192. Binding sewn, flat spine. ISBN 978-80-88033-05-9. Retail price 590 Kč.

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