Modern Architecture In Czechoslovakia And Other Writings

This series offers a range of heretofore unavailable writings in English translation on the subjects of art, architecture, and aesthetics.Teige's principal work on modernism, now in English for the first time, is supplemented by a selection of his other writings on art and architecture.

This book explores the significant body of architectural photographs produced in Czechoslovakia in the period of the 1920s and 1930s. In these important years, both architects and photographers saw themselves as participants in the creation of a new world, pursuing beliefs in social and technological utopias. Practitioners in the two fields shared and stimulated each other's vision, fostering interplay that consisted of mutual influences, parallels, and affinities. The process of modernization as well as the creation of nation states and the rise of the middle class started later in Central Europe than in Western Europe. With its young middle class, Czechoslovak state eagerly embraced modern ideas and recognized in architecture a powerful tool for expressing its goals and ideals. For this reason, Czechoslovakia became one of the centers of the modern movement in architecture in the 1920s and 1930s. -- From publisher's description.

This pocket-sized yet comprehensive guidebook to modern architecture in Prague shows its development from the Art Nouveau and beginnings of the Modern Style at the turn of the 20th century, the unique Cubist buildings from the years before World War I, the "National Style" of the newly established Czechoslovak Republic, the functionalist avant-garde of the inter-war period, the most remarkable examples of post-World War II buildings, and the revival of architectural production after 1989. 200 pages cover 220 buildings spanning the period 1900 to 1997. Each entry contains a descriptive text, period photographs, and selected entries are provided with plans. An indispensable companion for discovering the vast architectural heritage of the Czech capital.

Suppressed by the former communist governments and overshadowed by a focus on German and Dutch early modernism, the outstanding achievements of functionalist architects in Eastern Europe have been largely ignored by historians and critics. this book is the first retrospective ever published of functionalist buildings completed between the wars, the "Golden Age" of modernism, in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland. It is illustrated with rare archival and current photographs of the most famous and exemplary projects in each country: sanatoriums, hotels, sports facilities, private houses, offices, and religious and governmental buildings. Among the illustrious architects whose work is presented here are Karel Teige, Bohuslav Fuchs, and Josef Gocar of Czechoslovakia; Alfred Forbat and Jozsef Fischer of Hungary; and Lucian Korngold, Barbara and Stanislaw Brukalski, and Bohdeon Lachert of Poland. An introductory essay examines functionalism in Eastern Europe from an international perspective; essays by prominent architectural historians from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland explore competing ideas and functionalism in each country.

This book explores the remarkable interconnections of the Czechoslovak environment and the work and legacy of the Vienna Circle on the philosophical, scientific and artistic level. The Czech lands and later Czechoslovakia were the living and working space for the predecessors and catalysts for Logical Empiricism, such as Bernard Bolzano, Ernst Mach and Albert Einstein, along with key figures in the Vienna Circle such as Philipp Frank and Rudolf Carnap. Moreover, Prague hosted important academic events in which Logical Empiricism was presented to the public, such as the September 1929 1st Conference on the Epistemology of the Exact Sciences, which launched the key manifesto, The Vienna Circle. The Scientific Conception of the World. In addition, this book investigates both the positive and negative receptions of Logical Empiricism within Czech and Slovak intellectual circles. The volume features a selection of contributions to the international conference, The Vienna Circle in Czechoslovakia, held in Pilsen, Czech Republic, in February 2015. These essays are supplemented by two texts of vivid personal memoirs by Nina Holton and Ladislav Tondl. The book is of interest to scholars and researchers interested in the history of philosophy and science in central Europe and the philosophy of science and the Logical Empiricism of the Vienna Circle.

In the 1960s, socialist and capitalist urban planners, architects, and city officials chose the urban periphery as the site to test out new ideas in modernist architecture and planning: the outskirts of Prague and a bedroom suburb of Toronto would be the sites for experimental urban development. In the Suburbs of History overcomes the divisions between East and West to reassemble the shared histories of modern architecture and urbanism as it shaped and re-shaped the periphery. Drawing on archives, interviews, architectural journals, and site visits to the peripheries of Prague and Toronto, Steven Logan reveals the intertwined histories of capitalist and socialist urban planning. From socialist utopias to the capitalist visions of the edge city, the history of the suburbs is not simply a history of competing urban forms; rather, it is a history of alternatives that advocated collective solutions over the dominant model of single-family home ownership and car-dominated spaces.

The Optimum Imperative examines architecture’s multiple entanglements within the problematics of Socialist lifestyle in postwar Czechoslovakia. Situated in the period loosely bracketed by the signing of the Munich accords in 1938, which affected Czechoslovakia’s entrance into World War II, and the Warsaw Pact troops’ occupation of Prague in 1968, the book investigates three decades of Czech architecture, highlighting a diverse cast of protagonists. Key among them are the theorist and architect Karel Honzík and a small group of his colleagues in the Club for the Study of Consumption; the award-winning Czechoslovak Pavilion at the 1958 World Expo in Brussels; and SIAL, a group of architects from Liberec that emerged from the national network of Stavoprojekt offices during the reform years, only to be subsumed back into it in the wake of Czechoslovak normalization. This episodic approach enables a long view of the way that the project of constructing Socialism was made disciplinarily specific for architecture, through the constant interpretation of Socialist lifestyle, both as a narrative framework and as a historical goal. Without sanitizing history of its absurd contortions in discourse and in daily life, the book takes as its subject the complex and dynamic relationships between Cold War politics, state power, disciplinary legitimating narratives, and Czech architects’ optimism for Socialism. It proposes that these key dimensions of practicing architecture and building Socialism were intertwined, and even commensurate at times, through the framework of Socialist lifestyle.