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September 2005: Prague -- 20th-Century Architecture in Transition

0by John Morris Dixon, FAIA

0September 17-23, 2005

0Presented by the AIA Committee on Design
Conference chair: Peter Lizon, FAIA
Committee chair: Ronnette Riley, FAIA

0AIA Staff:
Vanessa Williamson, director, AIA Academies and Networks
Christine Klein, managing director, AIA Meetings
Kathleen Lane, project manager, AIA Committee on Design

0Presented with vital support from USG, the 2005 AIA Committee on Design sponsor.

Overview

0All of the AIA Knowledge Communities are specialized in some way except for the Committee on Design, whose conferences are about architecture in all its manifestations—new and old, from single-family houses to vast urban complexes, at home and abroad Those who attend COD conferences take home valuable lessons about design—plus some insights on practice—that can be applied to innumerable situations.

0In the Czech Republic in September 2005, some 100 participants spent six days examining, hearing about, and discussing a remarkable variety of architectural phenomena, focusing on the Czechs’ brief but prolific “Golden Age of Modernism” (the interwar period 1919 to 1938) and covering interesting work of other periods up to the present. Wide-ranging examples seen and discussed included office buildings, hotels, retail arcades, churches, houses, and exhibition buildings.

0As most of us first-time visitors to Prague had heard, it is a charming city. Its center is delightfully walkable, its streets and squares lined with varied pastel facades and interspersed with landmarks from the Gothic to the Modern period. There are appealing views of the Vltava River winding through the city, with the castle-crowned hill on one side and numerous graceful bridges, including the statue-studded Charles Bridge, spanning it. After decades of Soviet-imposed stagnation, this city of over 1.5 million is again a place of thriving commerce and high-quality travelers’ amenities.

0Beyond its admirable charms as an urban environment, however, Prague has vital lessons for us about the relationship of architecture to political and economic forces, which have battered the Czechs over the past century. Architects and clients here were remarkably quick to adopt Modern design ideas as they evolved in the early 1900s, then to embrace a pure Functionalist Modernism linked to the arrival of independence and democracy in 1918. But from 1938 to 1989, Modernism was ruthlessly suppressed under the ideologies of the Nazis, then the Soviets. Since 1989, a strong revival of Modern design has paralleled the revival of democracy.

0A full schedule of tours and lectures, with a kickoff dinner-lecture, midday meals in settings related to the subject, and a final breakfast seminar, gave conferees a semester’s worth of education in six days. Skilled, enthusiastic local guides, backed up by knowledgeable architecture students, made the tours both informative and enjoyable.

0A one-day side trip to Brno, about 125 miles from Prague, exposed us to some especially fine examples of the Czech Republic’s Modern architecture. At one evening reception, winners of the 2005 COD Ideas Competition—which solicited designs for a Czech Center for Architecture—were honored and their designs displayed. The setting for the reception was the Medieval Bethlehem Chapel, adjoining the well-stocked Fraktaly architectural book store and the Klub Architektu restaurant.

0Here are some of the principal subjects of the conference, organized by period.

Architecture before Modernism

0Prague’s architectural heritage is unusually intact because the city has suffered little war damage since the 1700s. There was continuous replacement of old buildings in the city center through the early 20th century, but the economic doldrums of the Soviet years yielded little new construction—except for much grim concrete high-rise housing around the periphery. Preservation efforts since 1989 have benefited from the sophistication that had developed internationally in this field.

0Prague Castle is much more extensive and diverse than its name implies. Occupying a large hilltop acreage, surrounded by parkland on the lower slopes, the “castle” includes a wide variety of ambitious structures dating from the Gothic and Baroque periods to the Modern. It includes the medieval St. Vitus Cathedral, a series of palace buildings dating from many periods, and the national art museum, plus extensive formal and naturalistic gardens. Most of it is accessible to the public. The conference visit focused mainly on the castle’s significant 20th-century additions.

0The ghetto in the heart of Prague’s Old City contains a cluster of seven historic synagogues, dating from as far back as the14th century, some of them open as museums of Jewish life and worship. The cemetery here has a remarkable density of gravestones, as successive generations were interred above earlier ones—a process that corresponded to the slow elevation of the ground level in the flood-prone Old City. It is ironic that while tourists now queue up to enter these sites, the Jewish population of Prague, once a substantial portion of the whole, is now estimated to be only about 5,000.

Emergent Modernism under the Empire

0Long before the Modern Movement coalesced, various early stirrings of Modern design were felt in Prague and throughout the empire of which it was part up to 1918. The various fledgling Modern efforts of Art Nouveau, Secessionism, and other movements were reflected in Czech work of the time and gave birth to the particular local variety known as Czech Cubism. Those expecting a strong correlation between this movement and art of Picasso or Braque won’t find it; this design movement is a distinctive variety of what can be called geometrical Art Nouveau. The prosperity and joie de vivre of the Austro-Hungarian Empire of the time are expressed in Prague’s inventively decorated buildings and interiors of the years before World War I.

0Of the several works of this period the attendees saw, two stand out. The Municipal House (1903-1912, Osvald Polivka and Antonin Balsanek) is a cultural and entertainment palace created to serve the rapidly expanding demand of the time for public amusement, dining, concerts, and lectures—in this case, all under one block-long roof. Its expansive, symmetrically disposed volumes display an almost dazzling amount of inventive ornament, inside and outside. Conference attendees heard speakers in a richly decorated salon and had lunch in the vaulted basement dining room. Some nearby hotels also showed characteristics of Czech Art Nouveau, with fanciful curvilinear decoration and vivid colors. The work of this period seems to revel in the use of glass—clear, colored, textured, in screens, in mirrors, in prisms, and in the newly introduced electric lighting fixtures.

0The Black Madonna Building (1912, Josef Gocar) is an exemplar of Czech Cubist architecture—and appropriately houses a museum of the movement, including paintings, furniture, glassware, and other design objects. Forgoing the intricacy and dazzle of Art Nouveau, this style is characterized mainly by polygonal geometries, sparser ornament, natural or more somberly colored materials—seemingly influenced by such diverse sources as the English Arts and Crafts movement and the Russian Constructivists. Before visiting the exhibits here, the conferees enjoyed a coffee break in the building’s airy café, recently restored largely on the basis of three period photos.

Plecnik, the Individualist

0As the architecture world shifted from traditional styles to Modernism, Joze Plecnik was one of those one of those who manipulated the old forms in inventive ways to yield a highly personal style. Like such contemporaries as the American Bertrand Goodhue or the English Edwin Lutyens, Plecnik was scorned by Modernists, then rediscovered around 1970 as a precursor of the Postmodernists.

0While Plecnik did most of his work in his native Slovenia, the second largest body of his work is in Prague. From 1920 to 1934, he carried out a series of interventions at the Prague Castle under the patronage of Czechoslovak President Masaryk. Plecnik designed no new buildings here, but rather a number of rooms, stairways, terraces, and such that add up to a unique demonstration of both inventiveness and sensitivity to context. Using simplified, reproportioned Classical forms, his work here is at once clearly of the 20th century, yet evocative of archaic periods such as the Minoan. From the mid-1930s through 1952, Plecnik’s assistant, Otto Rothmayer, continued his work here. The tradition of small-scaled interventions in the huge Castle precinct has been resumed in the past decade (see below).

0Plecnik’s one boldly freestanding building in Prague is the Church of the Sacred Heart (1928-32). Rising in a hilltop park in an early 20th-century neighborhood, this building defies judgment. Its highly monumental exterior has forcefully projecting ornament, ranging from stripped Classical to strictly geometrical. A slab-like tower toward the rear displays an enormous clock, with glass faces front and rear forming a circular window through it. Why is a huge clock dominating a church dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Mary? As one enters, the expectation of a theatrical interior—with daylight from the tower—is contradicted. The space is almost square, with a flat, coffered ceiling and even light from bands of windows high on the walls. It is a sober space, more characteristic of a meeting house than a church. Reportedly, Plecnik and his clients wanted the church to be perceived as a civic monument, situated as it on a public open space.

Golden Age under a New Republic

0There was a remarkable flowering of Modernism under the republic of Czechoslovakia, established in 1918, a movement clearly connected to the country’s newfound independence and democratic government. Most of this work was by Czech architects, who had kept abreast of international design developments during the final years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and some of whom had studied or apprenticed in Germany, France, and the United States. Architects such as Le Corbusier, Gropius, and Oud lectured in Prague during the 1920s. Czech patrons also commissioned architects such as Mies van der Rohe from Germany, Adolph Loos from Austria, and Mart Stam from the Netherlands (see coverage of houses below). Vladimir Slapeta delivered an excellent lecture summarizing the Functionalist movement (as international Modernism was known in Czechoslovakia).

0A walk through the center of Prague revealed such landmarks as the Bata department store (1927-29, Jindrich Svoboda and Ludvik Kysela), with its sleek steel and glass curtain wall looking like work of the 1950s. (The Bata company built rigorously Modern stores throughout Czechoslovakia and a whole company town in the 1930s, plus housing for its workers in England and in Maryland.) Of the city’s many through-block commercial arcades we visited, a notably Modernist one was the Black Rose Arcade (1929-33, Oldrich Tyl; restored 1999), with its glass-block-studded shallow vault and sleek walls. It has recently been restored to its Early Modernist purity (by architects Vaclav Alda, Petr Dvorak, Martin Nemec, and Jan Stempel).

0A fascinating application of the Functionalist aesthetic to a religious building is found in the Jan Hus Church (1931-33, Pavel Janak), which was built as a wing of a medium-rise apartment structure. The severe interior – befitting Jan Hus, Prague’s celebrated early Protestant martyr – is laid out as a small auditorium, with seating in tiered arcs. The floor below the church itself originally housed a small theater, converted decades ago into a columbarium.

0In a day trip to Brno (see items on the Brno Trade Fair and the Tugendhat house, below), conferees viewed a well-mounted exhibition in the Baroque Spilberk Castle on the city’s Modern architecture from the years 1919 to 1939, showing many accomplishments of international significance.

Trade Fairs as Design Laboratories

0During the peak period of Czech Modernism, opportunities for avant-garde design were presented by the trade fair sites in both Prague and Brno. As a new type of activity, the trade fair seems to have lent itself to Modernism.

0Prague’s version of this innovative type, officially called the Prague Sample Fair Building (1924-28, by Oldrich Tyl and Josef Fuchs) is a large rectangular volume filling most of a city block to a height of eight stories. Its exterior has all the earmarks of the International Style, with continuous bands of glazing and spandrels cantilevered slightly beyond its visible structural framing. Inside, it has two large skylighted atriums, the taller one reaching up the entire eight stories and surrounded by the smooth parapets of surrounding display floors. Suggesting a rectangular Guggenheim, this exhilarating space was adapted – after serious fire damage in 1973 – to house the Modern collection of the National Gallery, where works of such artists as Picasso and Klimt mingle with a rich sampling of Czech Modern paintings, design objects, and architectural drawings.

0Brno chose a very different form for its trade fair site, also opened in 1928, originally as an Exhibition of Contemporary Culture on the tenth anniversary of the republic’s founding. Known as the Brno Exhibition Center, this complex has been designated the nation’s sole trade fair site since 1951 and accommodates a full calendar of events drawing attendees from all over Europe. Located on a large acreage at the edge of the city, the Brno complex looks more like a permanent world’s fair, with freestanding pavilions and axial promenades.

0Of the many strictly Modernist structures here, the most striking is Hall A, with parabolic-arched halls reaching out like fingers from a domed rotunda, illuminated by skylights set between their concrete ribs (1928, by E. Kralik with engineer J. Valenta). With simpler means, they yield the kind of spatial/structural excitement seen in recent Calatrava work. Numerous other structures completed up through 2003 include the circular Hall Z, with a 90-meter clear span.

Landmark Houses by Mies, Loos, and Stam

0Most of us arrived with a mental image of Mies van der Rohe’s Tugendhat House (completed in 1930), an architectural pilgrimage site that largely justified the nearly three-hour bus trip from Prague to Brno – and encouraged many of us to attend the conference in the first place. Imprinted on our minds was an image of the fluid main interior, subtly marked off by chrome-plated columns and freestanding partitions, plus perhaps an exterior image as seen from the back garden. But while Mies was conceptualizing about universally replicable architecture, he gave this house a highly idiosyncratic form fitted closely to the specifics of its site, a modest-sized suburban lot sloping sharply down from the street.

0At first sight of the house, Mies’s insistent horizontal planes are apparent. The street level consists largely of open space under a continuous flat canopy, with islands of enclosed space, housing mostly bedrooms in the form of small cellular rooms. The front door is at this level, but half hidden behind the cylindrical translucent-glazed volume that expressively contains the main stair. (Understated entrance doors, juxtaposed to prominent platforms and stairs, were to remain characteristic of Mies.) The street-level floor plane is in fact the roof of the main volume of the house, which takes the form of a glass-walled podium. The principal living space, its disproportionately vast area clearly meant for entertaining, takes up a large part of this podium and displays the translucent onyx and exotic wood screen walls that are familiar from the history books. The whole-bay-wide sheets of metal-framed glass overlooking the carefully designed rear garden can retract into the floor, turning the entire space into a grand elevated porch. Overlooked in the typical histories is the large glass-walled conservatory that lines the south side of the main space with year-round greenery.

0The Tugendhats had to leave their house after only eight years, when the Nazis took over. After 1945 it used as a dance school, a rehabilitation center, among other things. It was substantially renovated in 1985 for use as a municipal VIP quarters, and it has been open to the public since 1994. The house appears remarkably close to its original state, with the approximations of the original furnishings in the major spaces. But corrosion and masonry cracks – plus some poor substitutions for the original glazing – signal the need for another rehabilitation, which is scheduled to start soon and take three years.

0Also completed in 1930, the Villa Mueller in Prague, designed by Adolf Loos (with Karel Lhota) presents a very different approach to Modernism, for a program and site similar in many ways to Tugendhat’s. Loos, a native of Brno who worked primarily in Vienna, discarded most of the conventions of traditional architecture but maintained a commitment to rooms, as against fluid spaces. He also retained a clear distinction between the interior and the exterior, which he shaped here as literally an envelope – or perhaps a shipping carton – punctured by minimally detailed openings wherever interior needs dictated. (Although trim at these punctures is minimal, it is painted a striking yellow-gold.)

0Like the Tugendhat House, the Mueller villa sits on a suburban lot – a more constricted one – that slopes sharply down from the street. Here, too, the main living space stretches across the back of the house, with service spaces located toward the street. But while some rooms open into other ones, they do so only through clearly framed portals; floor levels shift, notably to create the large-scaled volume of the living room, with intricate sequences of stairs. All rooms are distinctively tailored to their specific uses, varying widely in scale, with no hint of modular repetition; surface materials and colors, including those of architect-specified furnishings, vary so widely as to constitute a kind of sampler of possible effects. Juxtaposed to all this variety and specificity is an unobstructed roof deck spanning the top of the house, with a broad view across the city.

0Like the Tugendhats, the Muellers had to give up their house after only a few years, but it suffered little abuse and contains virtually all of its original furnishings and seems well managed as a museum house. Loos’s materials, including opulent varieties stones, woods, and fabrics, have proven very durable.

0A third pioneering Modern house, unknown to almost all the attendees, is the 1932 Palicka House by the Dutch architect Mart Stam. Still privately occupied, it has recently been restored by the architect Ladislav Labus. It is located in the notable Baba colony of Modern houses built from 1928 to 1940 on the outskirts of Prague, mainly by Czech architects, as one of the demonstration projects of Modernism undertaken in several European cities (including Brno). Besides their flat roofs and white, cubic forms, the houses were characterized by combined living-dining spaces, small functionalist bedrooms, and ample outdoor living spaces; gardens were designed to be continuous throughout the development. Although there have been the inevitable alterations, the Baba neighborhood appears to be remarkably intact.

0At the Palicka House, like the Mueller and Tugendhat, the site slopes down sharply from the street. (It’s no accident that Modern houses are often on plots considered too challenging for traditional architecture.) The main volume of this house – which we were not able to enter – stands on two-story-high columns, defining a carport at the lowest level, with a large open play space – glazed on the street side – hovering above that. The effect of a thin-skinned cage supported by tall columns recalls Rudolph Schindler’s Lovell Beach house of 1926 in California. It seems this Stam house deserves to be better known, along with dozens of its neighbors in the Baba community.

Architecture of Socialist Ideology

0Only three years after the nightmare of Nazi occupation ended in 1945, a Communist regime with rigid limits on architecture was imposed on Prague. So-called Socialist Realism was required of all the arts until 1989. Modernism was condemned as an expression of “bourgeois cosmopolitanism.” Fortunately little was built during these decades in the center of Prague, although many grimly repetitive industrialized housing complexes rose around its edges.

0There were nevertheless horrific effects on Czech architectural practice and education. Architects who had led a vigorous local Modern movement were either exiled, relegated to obscurity, or forced to design grudgingly in the dictated style. Some found refuge in restoration work, for which the need continues, regardless of regime.

0In his keynote talk at the opening conference session, Peter Kratochvil eloquently summarized the dismal effects on architecture of 40 years under Communism. There was a lack of information on worldwide developments, virtually no foreign travel, control by narrow-minded authorities, and favoritism toward party faithful. Public self-criticism was sometimes required of those who strayed in any way. All architectural work of any consequence had to be done by state-organized institutes. Modern design was prohibited for architecture faculty and students. There was a brief period in the 1960s when Modernism was encouraged, but it didn’t last.

0The conferees examined two principal built examples of Socialist Realism – both of them hotels. The Hotel Jalta, in a prime central location on central Wenceslas Square, is a benign example of its period (1958, by local architect Antonin Tenzer). It takes is place politely in a long row of buildings – of similar scale and varied styles – lining the square. Its symmetry and its well-proportioned façade in neutrally colored stone illustrate some virtues of the style. Its sequence of public interiors shows that effective spatial organization can be accomplished in any style. But the uninspiring interior details and materials still reflect the cautious tastes of Communist officialdom. The building is classified, in today’s enlightened climate, as a cultural landmark.

0The much larger and conspicuously freestanding International Hotel (1952-57, now Hotel Crowne Plaza) is, fortunately, outside the city center, its characteristically Soviet wedding-cake silhouette looming over a satellite neighborhood. Even here, the Czechs seem to have somewhat limited the Socialist damage, with relatively restrained detail on its buff brick exterior and dignified, well-organized public interiors. While clearly a what-not-to-do example, the hotel meets the symbolic and populist objectives of the Post-Modernists disconcertingly well.

0A third Communist-era landmark, not visited but frequently seen by attendees, is the city’s 474-meter-tall TV Tower, started under the Communist government in 1985 and finished after the revolution in 1992. Here is an example of high-tech Modernism gone awry -- an awkward asymmetrical assemblage of metallic elements on a hilltop somewhat removed from the city center. (It is now adorned with sculptures of huge babies, visible at a great distance, appearing to climb the tower. It was said, inevitably, that its part-way-up café and observation deck are popular because the tower itself doesn’t spoil their views.

Modernism Unleashed

0Because the Czech Republic was freed from the Soviet yoke, Prague has experienced a burst of activity, including new construction and sensitive rehabilitation.

0Two visited projects addressed the issue of inserting new Modern structures into Prague’s dense commercial core. The Langhans complex by Czech architect Ladislav Labus includes some coolly minimalist construction in a penthouse, rear wing, and garden court of a c.1900 existing building. The disciplined use of glass, steel, and natural wood reflect both today’s best international work and the heyday of Czech Modernism in the 1920s and 1930s.

0The Myslbek Shopping Mall (Holzel, Kerel, and Parent,1996) makes a much more conspicuous statement of modernity and novelty along a commercial street. It includes a vast steel-framed screen with bold diagonal elements that can close over its street-floor retail arcade and the five stories of offices above it.

0At the Prague Castle, where attendees walked through Gothic halls and examined work by Joze Plecnik (see above), we also saw some work of the past few years. One sleek insertion in the Castle’s gardens is the Orangerie designed by the London-based Czech Eva Jiricna. Essentially a greenhouse supporting public gardens, this long, low structure is constructed of prefabricated metal-and-glass modules in an updated version of the greenhouse’s role as an archetype for lightweight, industrialized construction.

0Another even more recent intervention at the Castle is the tunnel-and-walkway passage designed by the Czech architect Josef Pleskot as a new public entrance through the Deer Moat that divides the Castle grounds. The tunnel, a vertically-oriented ellipse in section, lined with glazed tile, is a disarmingly simple and satisfying response to an unusual demand, accommodating both a small stream and a walkway.

Eva Jiricna: The Exile Returns

0One of the highlights of the conference was a talk by Eva Jiricna, the Czech architect who has established an international reputation working in London. She explained that she went to London in 1968 with a team of architects to work on the Czech Embassy there, but was not permitted to return. She hadn’t intended to be an émigré. When she was able to return to Prague in 1990, she was struck by the isolation of her colleagues. She won a competition in 1992 for the office interiors of Gehry’s “Fred and Ginger” building and found almost no contractors able to put up plasterboard or glass partitions. For this and her Orangerie at the Prague Castle (see above) she said she had to revive not only construction skills but worker pride. For the prefabricated components of the demountable Orangerie, she found a German company willing to open a factory in the Czech Republic.

0She has also built one small hotel, remodeled and expanded another, and restored the historic St. Anne’s church. In her work, she had to deal with the unusual Czech copyright laws, which protect the integrity of an approved design even if it was never built (as happened at the hotel site) and preservation regulations that protected previous inappropriate alterations (at the church). Three of the attendees stayed at her Hotel Josef (not large enough as conference headquarters, which was at the quite adequate Hotel Alcron). We enjoyed the Hotel Josef’s thoughtful planning and crisp, minimalist design, relieved by witty details and areas of bold color.

International Designer Beachheads

0One of the first and most conspicuous of recent buildings signaling a renewed commitment to the avant-garde is the so-called “Fred and Ginger Building” (also known locally as the “Dancing Building”) designed by Frank Gehry and completed in 1994 (three years before Bilbao). Prominently sited along the river, on a corner where a bridge plaza interrupts a long riverfront row, the eight-story structure is both highly idiosyncratic and very sensitive to its context. Housing only a few modest-scaled office floors and a top-floor restaurant, it has a sculptural and urbanistic significance far outweighing any mundane usefulness.

0Gehry and his clients seem to have fully grasped the potential of the situation. The design starts at each end with volumes that roughly correspond to neighboring structures, then expands radically on the tradition of the cylindrical corner element – which appears frequently in Prague. Here a pair of curved forms, pinched at the waist, so to speak, readily suggests a dancing couple (like the famous Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers of early movies, for anyone who missed the reference). “Ginger” has a wide-flaring skirt and street-floor legs, extending out over the sidewalk (by agreement with the city); the less sinuous Fred has a head assembled of metal mesh reminiscent of the sphere atop Olbrich’s 1898 Secession Building in Vienna. The restaurant terrace under this swirling crown – a significant sculpture in itself – makes a memorable observation platform.

0Three recent office complexes illustrate how foreign firms can address issues in addition to inventive form. The Danube House (Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates; ADNS, architect of record, 2003), the first office building in an extensive development planned for a former industrial tract along the river, uses an ample atrium, special glass cladding, louvers, and an underground heating/cooling source to minimize energy demand, while offering virtually all workers fine views. It is considered Prague’s first major demonstration of sustainable design.

0Nearby, in the Nova Karlin complex (1998) the Spanish architect Ricardo Bofill has reclaimed a series of industrial buildings as office space, with new additions or insertions such as lobbies and penthouses. Former truck areas have become landscaped courts. While the KPF building has a rich but restrained material palette featuring brick and sandstone, Bofill uses vivid red and white paint to give his inherently disparate complex a coherent, upbeat image. Also nearby, in the Smichov area is the Golden Angel building by Jean Nouvel (with Petr Dvorak, principal of ADNS, 2000), which has an irregularly shaped glass skin treated to present the ghostly image of an angel several stories high along several quotations.

Czech Architectural Practice Today

0In an enlightening final conference session, Irena Fialova pointed out that Czech architects still face limitation on the international scene. They do not have advanced computer modeling systems or other technological capabilities of a Foster or a Piano. They still lag, as well, in the real experience of avant-garde work abroad. Prague’s new Danube House office building (see above) benefited from British and French expertise, which Czech architects are under pressure to equal.

0Architect Petr Dvorak spoke as principal of a 30-person firm, started in 1991. He worked on the Czech Pavilion of the Seville World’s Fair of 1992, which was fabricated locally and shipped to Spain. His firm learned much from restoration work on the Municipal House and the Black Rose Arcade (both discussed above). They are now designing several large-scale new projects, including master planning commissions, and have competed – so far unsuccessfully – for work in Germany.

0Tomas Bitnar provided the perspective of a Czech émigré who has long practiced and taught in the United States, for the past several years in Montana. He cited several key differences between architects in the two countries: Czech architects don’t pay for their education, but must excel in a national test; registration entails a portfolio and an interview; once registered, they are addressed with their title in front of their name. Design competitions are the prevailing way to get commissions, and young architects, debt-free and generally living with their families, willingly take on the unpaid work involved. In their subsequent careers, they face less pressure than in America to compromise with lawyers and developers.

0Hugh Hochberg, an American consultant on architectural practice, rounded out the discussion. An architecture graduate who then got an MBA, he cited lessons that could be taken back home to the States. There is a powerful lesson, he said, in the rejuvenation of Czech architectural practice and design accomplishments once relieved of the Communist yoke. Their achievement should inspire Americans to take stronger action against the relatively manageable obstacles we face. Another, related, lesson is that American architects should make greater investments in intellectual development.

0For those who attended, this conference was a sound investment in intellectual development.

0John Morris Dixon, FAIA, is an architectural journalist who served as chief editor of Progressive Architecture magazine from 1972 to 1996. His articles have appeared in Architectural Record, Architectural Research Quarterly, Architecture, House & Garden, and many other periodicals. He is the editor of the Urban Spaces series of books and the author of The World Bank: Kohn Pedersen Fox and the Architecture of a Landmark Building.