Karel Honzík: Josef Havlíček in Life, in Work, and in Collaboration

If the old saying “habent sua fata libelli” (books have their fates – Latin) holds true, then it certainly applies to this book, whose author departed before it went to print. Our architectural and artistic community loses a prominent figure with the sudden death of Josef Havlíček, a long-time friend to his generational peers. I remember the times—around the 1920s—when he started appearing in the drawing rooms of the Prague Faculty of Architecture alongside Alois Wachsmann. They formed a peculiar pair, always ready for ironic pranks, dressed according to the eccentric fashion of that time, but with their unique adjustments. Their figures were entirely contrasting, as Wachsmann was slender and excessively tall, while Havlíček was shorter but robust. Above all, they came to school to provoke conservative educators and perplexed classmates with their cubist architectures and images. They accompanied their works with fervent speeches, sometimes styled in an almost incomprehensible manner, as they created their own words.
At that time, both were members of the group of young artists “Devětsil,” who exhibited their works in shops on the main avenues (Klas in Spálená, Koruna in Wenceslas Square).
During this formative period, Havlíček went through a kind of Hofmannian cubism, serious and heavy, while his images resembled the works of customs officer Rousseau.
At Professor Folkman's institute, he experimented with cubist sculpture. I remember his polychrome Madonna, which combined a barbarizing representation inspired by African sculptures with the gentle simplicity of folk figurines.
He brought his concepts of urns and small utilitarian objects to Artěl, several of which were executed. They bore his distinctive features.
Interestingly, Stanislav Kostka Neumann, in his reflections on the art of the youngest (Kmen IV, No. 46, 1921), mentions Josef Havlíček as a sculptor.
I elaborate on these beginnings because often it is the period of initial youthful creation that heralds the fundamental character of the artist for life. And this was certainly the case with Havlíček. He was already a distinct personality at the age of twenty-one. There is no doubt that the significant influence of this early maturation was the brutal experience of war. Driven from the school bench to the trenches, he returned from the Italian front, which he miraculously survived. He brought back a kind of masculine roughness and Hašek-like humor. The fate of soldiers, shaken by arbitrary power across all European lands, deeply marked him, and he always returned—as he did later—to his favorite reading, Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus. But from the hell of war, he also brought back another trait: a desire for camaraderie and a deep love for simple beings and things. At the heart of his masculinity was a childishly tender core. These traits he maintained throughout his life.
Even then—at school—he followed an unconventional path, just as he did later. Not only in creation but also in personal ways. He remained enchanted by cubism for a time, and I remember that it was not easy for him (as for other architects of that time) to transition to functionalism. It meant abandoning subjective representation and seeking the poetry of the objective engineering-technical creative process. It was, in fact, a leap into a complete opposite. Therefore, he distanced himself from Devětsil for a time and only joined its purist-constructivist line in the 1920s. However, he still retained a tendency toward a kind of ideoplastical shaping, which fully manifested itself when he worked alone—for example, in the competition for the Kolín crematorium. Similar traits can be found in his design of the pyramidal skyscrapers, in which functionalism begins to merge into sculptural, sculptural creation.
From 1927 until 1936, we worked together, and in this association, we tried to push through all the difficulties of project designers. And only cheerful camaraderie helped us overcome new and new disappointments.
In the generation of contemporaries, it was an exceptional privilege that we could realize the Palace of the General Pension Institute (now ROH). In reality, however, it was a work of effort and patience that an individual could hardly bear alone on his own shoulders.
It was then that I recognized Havlíček's perseverance and combativeness.
It will never be unnecessary to remind again that being an architect, and especially a modern architect, meant constant struggle in the interwar period.
The first, humiliating battle was fought over obtaining work. It was necessary to submit countless petitions and requests (mostly in vain) to authorities, institutions, and individuals.
Once the assignment for sketches was obtained, the main battle followed—often fierce but also joyful. Namely, the very concept. This required the architect to grapple with himself and his co-authors and collaborators.
Today, when someone looks at the ROH palace, they can hardly guess how many sketches were discarded and how many times we argued over the sculptor's easel, on which the clay model rotated, was edged, adjusted, and photographed before the final form was such that we could both exclaim, “That's it!”
But with the submission of sketches, the architect's struggle was far from over. Perhaps I will have the opportunity to describe elsewhere the development of the project for the Palace of the General Pension Institute, which represents, in itself, a dramatic novel. Battling the sketches against all objections, tricks, and slanders was no small feat, whether for this building or for smaller projects.
When the definitive design assignment came, the struggle continued, and it was only during realization that it intensified. Then builders, entrepreneurs, members of construction committees, construction offices, and the ministry intervened in the concept. There were traps everywhere in the form of supposedly cheaper solutions, other building materials, and constructions. All these pitfalls, sometimes rough, sometimes sweet like siren voices, had to be navigated to maintain the unity of the concept until the moment when the users entered the new building.
I can testify to Havlíček's perseverance, which did not stop even before bickering over the smallest details, about handles, inscriptions, labels. There are dozens of them in the construction, and the average mortal doesn't even know that they contribute to the overall effect of the work, often deciding on the expressiveness of the environment. Only the designers would understand if I said that we went into battle, for example, for a special ceramic cornice, and that it required a multitude of approaches and discussions over which many would tire and resign.
Today, after thirty years, it can be said that only through the rare understanding of the members of the construction committee, communists, and left-wing democrats, and then thanks to the enlightenment of director Bedřich Ondřích, could we realize such a large building, in total harmony with our own artistic conviction.
The nervous strain that all these struggles required lasted few longer than ten, let’s allow fifteen years.
When we, together with Havlíček, completed the realization of the Palace of the General Pension Institute, we were everywhere rejected as applicants for further work. Instead of being recommended for being capable of executing similar projects, it instead became a brake for us. Everywhere they proved to us that we had already gained enough. They referred us to some sort of pension at the age of thirty-five. New struggles arose—struggles for obtaining the slightest work, like beginners.
When a serious illness began to afflict me, partially removing me from designing, I saw with astonishment how Havlíček continued forward and alone in vain effort.
In the year thirty-seven, he, among other things, threw himself into advocating for a unified block of rental houses in Letná. A truly Sisyphean task.
Some designers and theorists—if they really thought through their conception to the end—were aware that it was not the individual building but higher entities that constituted true architecture. Evidence of this is already in 1913, an article in the magazine Styl titled “Architectural Unity of Block Facades in Contemporary Construction” by Walter Curta Behrendt. And it is perhaps unnecessary to point out the leading architects of modern times who worked on designs for ideal cities, as they felt not only the social operational, technological production but also the artistic interrelationship between individual buildings. However, these were utopian efforts when applied under the conditions of dispersed individualistic ownership of land and business.
Many architects, including functionalists, had become so ingrained in the impossibility of realizing wholes under the specific conditions of interwar capitalism that they concentrated all their attention on the individual object.
When, in the thirties, the construction of the Prague Baba colony was being prepared, we submitted a proposal for a unified solution in the form of groups of row houses with Havlíček. We proposed a unified production process, construction prefabrication. We demonstrated that it would be possible to build an exhibition colony at a higher developmental level than the world-renowned Weissenhof colony in Stuttgart from 1927. Our proposal was rejected, although the decision was made by architects and artists themselves.
After so many bad experiences, I was even more surprised at the energy with which Havlíček endeavored to persuade the entire consortium of entrepreneurs and architects to commit to the unified construction of a block in Letná. He stood against them, alone, with only his renowned eloquence, which he supported with graphic arguments. This effort was crowned with success. A nearly miraculous and exceptional case. The realized block of electric houses, popularly called “Molochov,” is an example of unified construction on individual parcels, thus under material conditions that directly defied a unified concept.
It is obvious that Havlíček—like other architects with him—saw in the planned socialist economy the longed-for opportunity to realize the idea of wholes, in the sense of a unified living environment. He increasingly focused on solving so-called urban details, whether through new attempts to shape partial constructions in Žižkov or through projects for building complexes in Hradec Králové and Kladno. And it was certainly the changed social conditions that allowed him to realize the Kladno Rozdělova.
This realization, however, brought him certain difficulties stemming from the change in the fundamental conception of architecture that was just taking place. The line that we now retrospectively call Stalinist or the period of the “cult of personality” required solutions for ensembles, but as it was understood in many places as an excessive dependence on historicizing formalism, it meant for earlier functionalists an abandonment of the creative method, in which they had already acquired great experiences.
Only the subsequent period—namely, the period of Khrushchev's criticism, abandonment of historicizing templates—provided Havlíček and his peers with the opportunity to resume their previous experiences. It is indeed a pity that at a time when they could once again, so to speak, “find themselves,” Havlíček was taken from the drawing board by sudden and premature death.
That many, almost unattainable actions were accomplished by Havlíček was due to his extraordinary persuasiveness and eloquence.
But it was not just any eloquence; it was simply Havlíček's. When defending concepts and promoted ideas, he overwhelmed opponents and participants in meetings with anecdotes, parables, sayings, and often—much to the astonishment of the assembly—quoted Shakespeare, Swift, and his beloved Simplicissimus. He knew long passages of poems by heart. He replayed Mozart's Don Giovanni again and again to use certain passages in debate. His defenses were backed by broad scholarship and, primarily, by a conviction in the correctness of the goal: he aimed for a perfect work.
Havlíček's eloquence had peculiar distinctive features; it was, in fact, a “sui generis” art, and it is a pity that some of his talks were not captured on tape. When, before the Second World War, I witnessed Havlíček's tireless effort to promote grand projects (let's just recall his proposal for a tower clinical hospital on Karlovo náměstí), it seemed to me that he wanted to overcome and break some hidden law that prevented the generation of functionalists from fully realizing their visions. After all, if their futile projects were to be exhibited, all the exhibition halls of our country would not suffice.
A special study will be required to show that Havlíček's contemporaries—and there were highly gifted individuals among them—realized little or nothing from their proposals. Some gave up their futile attempts entirely, transitioned to other areas of construction, to offices, to schools. They could not endure health-wise or existentially.
However, it would be good to confront the futile projects of this generation with the realized construction. One would see the regretful shortsightedness of those who decided on it. Today, only an insider has an idea of the enormous effort that went to waste. And even while entire blocks and districts of the most banal and conventional construction grew around.
There are also many projects that Havlíček worked on, whether alone or with a co-author, whose comparison with realized objects would be very instructive. For other cases, I cite Havlíček's concept of urban offices on Kaprova street, which received only an award in a former competition. But how much higher value does it have than the realized building according to Koutský's design! Havlíček's concept is truly modern and yet has a certain dignity, for which it would fit into the environment. It was simply architecture. A matter so evident at first glance, perhaps it was not seen back then, perhaps it did not want to be seen.
This book, which he completed shortly before his death, although it certainly captures most of the main works on which Havlíček worked alone or with co-authors, could not encompass all the futile projects. And among them are very successful ones or often unpublished. (I point, for example, to the brewery building on Ječná street.)
If this book does not contain all the works on which Havlíček worked or collaborated, it represents a harvest so vast and shows so many realizations that it could serve as an argument against the assertion that Havlíček's generation could not fully realize its creative potential. However, this work is really that exceptional; it embodies so much energy and effort that it could only be paid for by shortening life. At the same time, it should be noted that Havlíček never affixed his signature to an average work. It is therefore a harvest rich not only in quantity but also in quality.
I must mention the peculiar characteristics of Havlíček as they played out in creative collectives. Real development shows that increasingly broader and more complex tasks can only be mastered through collective creation, not only through the stimulating participation of associated experts but directly through joint architectural representation. This is evidenced by the growing examples of author duos, trios, and larger groups.
Whereas in painting and sculpture (this also applies to poetry) it is about individual distinctiveness, in architectural work, collective distinctiveness manifests itself. That is why architecture is such an eminently stylistic art, and its peak manifestations belong precisely to those historical periods when architecture expressed more than personal feeling, but a societal, temporal feeling. Of course, it then immensely depends on the ability of the author-designer to sense the pulse of the time, specifically—to empathize with the harmony of the collective. It is a virtue that we are only learning after a period of wild individualism. It greatly depends on a complete engagement with the work, almost impersonally and transpersonally.
Havlíček already had all the prerequisites for achieving this virtue in his sociable nature. At the time I worked with him, it was not always possible to completely synchronize in terms of timing. There were periods when Havlíček worked and fully lived during the quiet night hours (similarly to K. Teige). For joint representation, it was only possible to meet in the evening, often at a time when the assistants had already left. However, as soon as Havlíček became interested in the design, as soon as he—so to speak—bit into it, the collective could be sure that he would not relent until it was realized down to the last detail or until all hopes for realization faltered. For future project practice, Havlíček serves as an example of how an architect must follow the manifestation of a work in the interest of its success until its absolute realization, until the time when people have already inhabited the new building or new series of buildings. Even then, the work should not fall from his heart, for much still adjusts under the influence of real life.
To be passionate about the work—Havlíček accomplished with such tirelessness that we see only in rare cases. It was almost his life's confession. That is why he wanted to include a citation from Ceram's book “Gods, Graves, and Scholars” in this book, but death took the pen from his hand before he could insert the passage from the “novel of archaeology” into the text where he intended.
I rectify fate at least to the extent that I include the citation in my introduction, for in Ceram's and Schopenhauer's words is contained directly what I have called Havlíček's life confession.
“Because the attacks against Schliemann were of a fundamental nature, it will be good for us to say something about this and quote. First, let us hear from a very poisonous philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer:
Dilettantes, dilettantes—they are referred to those who cultivate some science or art out of love and for joy, per il loro diletto, with contempt for those who engage in them for profit, because they are only pleased by the money they can earn. This underestimation is based on their base conviction that no one will fully engage in anything unless compelled by need, hunger, or some other desire. The public has the same spirit, and hence the same opinion: this results in its general respect for ‘people of the trade’ and mistrust of dilettantes. In reality, for the dilettante, the matter is the goal; for the expert, merely a means: however, only those who care directly about it devote themselves to it with full seriousness and who pursue it out of love for it, who practice it con amore. From these people, and not from lackeys waiting for a reward, has always come the greatest.” (Chapter 6. Schliemann's science.)
If I have said that Havlíček burned for the work, then another of his characteristics, namely artistic passion, was closely related to this. It went so far that he always had a pencil or fountain pen at hand even in conversations. What he could not express in words, he conveyed through drawing, graphics, or caricature. And it was always distinctive drawing, even if it contained only a few lines and strokes.
In the last period before his death, he returned to painting, which was one of his great hobbies, unfortunately never fully developed. In pictures of the simplest things, just as in those he painted during his student years, his realism appeared, but not the realism of routine craftsmen who simply replace the photographic camera. In his paintings was a warm, almost childlike joy from small things and beings, from their miraculous composition. The same joy led him to another auxiliary passion: microscopy. With the binocular microscope he procured, he admired the smallest beings, led his friends and collaborators to the eyepieces, urging them to share his wonders.
In the last period, when illness forced him to stay in bed, he sketched designs for utility items. As if he wanted to quickly reshape the world around him, to form it.
And finally, this book itself is evidence of Havlíček's artistic engagement. He composed its layout as an image, as architecture, for many years. He measured reproductions, sought their best interrelations. A matter which most authors leaves to technical and graphic edits. The original entry sheet was underlaid with musical notation from Don Giovanni, along with the symbolism of Prague. It expressed two great loves of Havlíček. Some pages astonish with their colorful, almost miniature composition. It is a remarkable work of graphic art. Artistic passion! But this is precisely what is needed at a time when increasingly powerful technical means allow society to mass-produce all consumer goods, all buildings, apartments, and their accessories. It is precisely artistic passion that can elevate mass production to a cultural level, transforming type and factory-produced residences into joyful environments.
Therefore, Havlíček will serve as an example even in the future. As an architect from the time of the immense leap from peak capitalism to the socialist era, he inscribed himself into history with his distinctive handwriting.