Prague Lecture FOA

The organizers of the lecture by Foreign Office Architects on October 21, 2005, at the Světozor cinema had a nice surprise for us right at the beginning. In addition to the widely announced Farshid Moussavi, Alejandro Zaera-Polo and their four-year-old daughter Miny came to see Prague. After a quarter-hour of coordinating with the technology, they unleashed a cascade of their projects on us. The regular handover of speech and a maximum of five minutes reserved for one building resulted in the audience being more exhausted than the main actors of the lecture.
Farshid and Alejandro could not start with any other project than the one that launched their star career - the international port terminus in Yokohama. Until then, both had been teaching at the prestigious AA in London, had not built a single structure, and were trying their luck in various competitions. They followed up with other projects of man-made residential landscapes, demonstrating that nearly any typology can be conceived as terrain. Their police station in the Spanish La Vila Joiosa was a testament to their sense of humor. Unfortunately, there was no time to mention the unusual paving of its surroundings, the compact resolution of complex traffic, or to savor the unique interior space. This is the price you pay when you have dozens of similarly good projects.
The last work of FOA, and the entire conclusion of the Prague lecture, was about ornament and decor in architecture, which is inextricably linked to the project from the very beginning of building design, a topic deserving of a separate discussion. Perhaps Adolf Loos' outdated opinion has already been clearly addressed by Jacques Herzog in his lecture on October 25, 2000, at London’s AA. With a clarified past, an exceptionally wide spectrum of architects worldwide is now dealing with this topic.
After the lecture, a question from the audience arose regarding their teaching activities. Both speakers attended prestigious universities (not just one), and the list of their pedagogical endeavors is equally breathtaking. Western universities can recruit the most qualified people from practice. Architects do not refuse this offer because they know it is a mutually beneficial symbiosis of teachers and students. The response to the audience's question about the future of their completed buildings was more than diplomatic. For example, the fate of the London Belgo Zuid, which had to be closed after a change of owner and redesign, must touch every author when their building does not fulfill its function or ceases to exist altogether. The Spanish pavilion at EXPO 2005 in Aichi, Japan, was different, as its short lifespan was anticipated from the very beginning.
The FOA studio does not embark on bold construction experiments like Toyo Ito or Shigeru Ban (Yokohama is an exception thanks to Balmond), nor does it create architectural precedents like H&deM, which may make it closer to us, Czechs. It shows that architecture for the needs and comfort of contemporary humans does not have to be dry, boring, and constantly looking back at history. The FOA lecture was not just a brief introduction to what is happening in the field of world architecture somewhere beyond the seven hills and the seven rivers, as it was last year in the case of Winy Maas. FOA is closer to us than it might initially seem. Throughout its history, Brno has kept an eye on what is happening in Vienna, and everyone went there for experience. In the current Austrian metropolis, those who set the direction for architecture teach in the schools. Among them is Farshid Moussavi from FOA. The trend of borrowing from Vienna cannot be stopped, and it is only a matter of time before the first students of FOA, such as Greg Lynn or the young Austrian offices, establish themselves here as well. Prague already has its querkrafts and delugan meissls. The fact that nothing is known about them abroad is a different problem.