Lecture series "Wednesdays at AVU"

The lecture series organized by the Research and Scientific Institute of the Academy of Fine Arts (VVP AVU) will focus for the first time on architecture in the summer semester of 2009/2010. During four lectures, it will attempt to touch on several themes of Czech and Slovak architecture from the 1960s to the present. Individual topics will be addressed by both architecture historians and the architects themselves.

Since 2007, when this series has been held at the AVU, several contemporary visual artists have presented their work as part of their own presentations. They have been complemented by theoretical lectures from curators or art historians concerning 20th and 21st-century art. (More info at http://vvp.avu.cz/aktivity/prednasky) For the winter semester of 2010/2011, we are preparing a series focused on the theoretical evaluation of the most contemporary trends in Czech art by young progressive theorists.

Lectures in the summer semester of 2009/2010:

March 17, 2010
HENRIETA MORAVČÍKOVÁ, The Monumentality of Late Modernism: Ideological or Architectural?

The head of the architecture department at the Institute of Construction and Architecture of the Slovak Academy of Sciences will address manifestations of monumentality in Slovak architecture in the second half of the 20th century, its relationship to the contemporary international discussion on monumentality, and social and historical conditions. She will also touch on the current reception of these buildings by both professional and lay audiences.


April 14, 2010
ZDENĚK HÖLZEL, Distant Echoes from the World: Archigram, McLuhan, Jencks, Venturi and Czech Architecture

Architect Zdeněk Hölzel, who in the late 70s and early 80s belonged to a group of young authors adopting postmodern ideas in Czechia, will give a lecture on the foreign inspirations of that time. He will speak about world architecture in the 60s and 70s, especially about Jencks and Venturi, whose texts he translated and published in samizdat in the 70s. "I don't want to speak as a theorist or historian, which I am not and have not been. Let alone a translator. Just an architect who wants to orient himself. Why all of this: an unobjective presentation of the atmosphere of that time.”

April 28, 2010
ROSTISLAV ŠVÁCHA, New Visions of Modernity, 1985-1995

A significant Czech architecture historian will track the work of several leading Czech architects who expressed a certain interest in Western postmodernism in the 70s and 80s but began to seek a different path in the second half of the 80s (Alena Šrámková, Emil Přikryl, Václav Králíček, Josef Pleskot, Ladislav Lábus, etc.). A mysterious role in their transition from postmodernism to a new modernity was played by references to the tradition of functionalism, which can be interpreted in various ways. A clear example of new modernity was shown to them by Swiss minimalist architecture.

May 12, 2010
OSAMU OKAMURA, Architecture as a Public Matter

Czech architecture and urban planning are still unable to escape the isolation of expert discourse. Who does the city belong to today? How to raise awareness of the values of well-designed built environments? These and other questions will be posed by the architect and editor-in-chief of the Brno magazine Era 21.

Lectures always begin at 18:00 in the Digilab AVU (auditorium) – 3rd floor, Academy of Fine Arts, U Akademie 4, Prague 7