Zdeněk Lakomý

Architect Zdeněk Lakomý was born in Místek in Silesia. In the 1930s, he studied at the Faculty of Architecture and Civil Engineering at the Czech Technical University in Prague. During World War II, he worked in the construction and design department of the Baťa company in Zlín. After the liberation, he became a tenacious advocate of socialist realism and a Marxist-Leninist approach to urbanism, which opened the door for him to hold various party positions. From the second half of the 1940s, he worked on the cinemafication of cities and conducted standardization of social facilities, cultural houses, theaters, etc., at the Institute for Research and Standardization. From 1951, he worked at the Research Institute for Construction and Architecture (VÚVA) in Prague, which he also led in the late 1950s. In the early 1960s, he served as the head secretary of the Committee for Socialist Culture and began teaching at the Department of Culture at the Political College of the ÚV KSČ. Since the 1960s, he was a member of the editorial boards of several magazines (e.g., Architektura ČSR, Životné prostredie). He was also one of the founders of the Cabinet for the Theory of Architecture and Environmental Creation at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences (1964-71), which he led throughout its existence. In the 1970s, he continued to work in the Department of Urbanism Theory and Environmental Creation at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. In a broader multidisciplinary team of collaborators (psychologists, sociologists, agronomists, lawyers, natural scientists, and environmentalists), he focused mainly on the issues of mass construction, interventions in the natural environment, and the impacts of the environment on the socialist person, among others. His focus gradually shifted from the theory of architecture and urbanism to the research of environmental theory and its preventive protection. For his activities, he received State honors, honorary membership in the Union of Czech Architects, and several other accolades.