Making the Most of Tomorrow by Spurný Matěj;

Author:Spurný, Matěj; [Spurný, Matěj]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC026030 SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / Urban
Publisher: Karolinum Press
Published: 2019-10-14T00:00:00+00:00

In connection with the political milestones of the years 1938 (the Munich Agreement and the Second Republic, 1939 (the beginning of the German occupation followed by the beginning of the Second World War), 1945 (the Liberation), and 1948 (the Communist takeover in February), there is a general tendency to perceive the thinking of the First Republic, from 1918 to 1938, including ideas about the public space, and the reality of the lives of the people living there (for example, the way Zlín operated) as something that existed within a closed period. Though Zlín was continually developing even during the war (under the supervision of the same architects) and afterwards, including after the Communist takeover (without the better-known architects, yet to a large extent based on their plans for many years after), this is even more true of the ideas of the interwar avant-garde. Teige, stigmatized by the new power-holders as too radical a modernist and an alleged ‘Trotskyist’, was silenced after the Communist takeover and died soon afterwards, yet figures like Honzík, Fragner, Voženílek, Janů, and Štursa shaped the debate about architecture and space, mainly urban space, in the 1950s and often well into the 1960s. It was largely the avant-garde architects of interwar Czechoslovakia who created the intellectual environment in which the vision of the new Most was born in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Yet, after 1948, the post-war debate about architecture, urban planning, and the new towns developed in Czechoslovakia, paradoxically, with a number of detours and returns. The period of social revolution and the building of socialism, from the standpoint of a number of modernists, was seen as the gateway to making their dreams and visions come true. In its first phase, the period was marked mainly by a return to tradition.

Criticism of Functionalism and Constructivism, conforming to the Soviet environment, which during the 1930s returned to Revivalist architecture, could to some extent follow on from the interwar left-wing architects’ departure from the formalism of modern Corbusierian architecture (which, according to them, had failed to solve the essence of the problem, that is, the lack of decent housing for the poor). ‘Purism, Constructivism, and Functionalism,’ wrote Honzík in the mid-1950s, ‘were not based on a clear Weltanschauung […], the connection with the Weltanschauung of Marxism-Leninism was tenuous, and if it at first seemed to exist, it became increasingly clear that the trends suited capitalism […].’329 Honzík would also follow on from his criticism of his own ideas in the interwar years, in which he distanced himself from the modernist dislike of ornament;330 in the 1950s, he did not scruple to call the rejection of ornament ‘purist dogma’ from which architecture should now distance itself, just as it should now also distance itself from the anti-traditionalism promoted by the Functionalists and Constructivists.331 The traditional, Revivalist use of elements on façades was, however, defended by Honzík and other architects, mainly with regard to the ageing of buildings, though arguments were made about ‘national folk art’ as a fundamental source of inspiration.

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