Category: Scientific Study

The article “Czech and Moravian Architectural Competitions in the Sixties – Their Specific Contribution to the History of Czechoslovak Modern Architecture” was published in the 47th volume of the Journal of Architectural and Town-Planning Theory. It summarized the results of the research which dealt with 152 selected competitions from this decade, which were held in […]

Sustainable Urban Design: A Solar Strategy for a Sustainable City

Sustainable development is a key principle in the European Union. As a moral leader and pioneer in energy-efficient buildings, the EU is carrying out the first legislative steps by implementing the Europe 2020 strategy in real life. Currently, the energy-efficient solutions for individual buildings are common knowledge; now the focus is shifting from single objects […]

Elites and the Public – The Ethical Dimension of Urban Planning in the Czech Republic

The public sector in the Czech Republic increasingly displays activity in participation in matters of further interest – and not only in the process of spatial planning. Gradually emerging as the general trend in the Czech Republic is a grouping of orientations described in Western professional literature since the 1960s. An apt description of this […]

The Principle of Density Regulation as a Way Towards Sustainable City Growth

Case Study – Master Plans of Selected Cities in Slovakia Cities in Slovakia have undergone significant expansion since the year 1990. This expansion is manifested in the growth of built-up areas, mainly in city suburbs, in the form of monofunctional development of individual housing units, construction of large industrial and logistics parks and massive commercial […]

Spa Technology with Steel – Cast-Iron Structures in Karlovy Vary

The Imperial Spa (Kaisersbad / Císařské lázně) is one of the largest and artistically richest spa houses in Karlovy Vary. A new peat spa was built on the site of the former Baroque brewery in the period of 1893 – 1895, following the plans of the well-known Viennese architectural partners Ferdinand Fellner and Hermann Helmer. […]

From Technical Beauty to the Medern Aesthetic and Back: Unrealised Industrial Buildings of Josef Marek in the Context of Modern Architectural Development 1900 – 1939

The present contribution addresses the analysis of the industrial buildings designed by architect Josef Marek during the 1920s against the background of the era’s discourse on the development of modern architecture and its mutual relations with industrial construction as its specific yet at the same time integral component, not only as the bearer of technical […]

Technical Objects in the Complex of the TBC Sanatorium in Vyšné Hágy

During the interwar period, when the prevalence of tuberculosis rapidly increased, one of the largest and most modern TBC sanatoriums in Czechoslovakia was constructed in a remote location in the High Tatras. Arising on apreviously vacant site above the settlement of Vyšné Hágy, this complex of buildings is one of the most impressive realizations of […]

The Industrial Heritage of the Dynamitka Works Versus Traditional Heritage Conservation

Update the Theoretical Basis Conservation of industrial heritage is often confronted with issues which it is seemingly unable to solve in practice. In Bratislava, the premises of Istrochem – the former ‘Dynamitka’ dynamite factory – clearly highlight this situation. Due to the contrast between its current state and its attributed historical importance, the complex represents […]

The Lusatian Lakeland

An Eastern German Project for the Transformation of an Industrial Opencast Mining Landscape The end of the GDR regime raised the question in the federal states of Brandenburg and Saxony in the east of Germany of what to do with the devastated lunar landscapes in the Lusatian mining district and the opencast mines which were […]

Automomous Universality

Attempts at Systematization in Hungarian Industrial Architecture in the Early Kádár Period The systematisation of planning and implementation in industrial architecture, which encompassed a rapidly changing and broad range of building types, was a crucial issue in Hungary throughout the two decades after World War II. The architects of the state-owned Industrial Building Design Company […]

Value Saving and Community use Regarding Urban Renewal

Protection of Hungarian Industrial Heritage and Possibilities for its Reutilization at the Turn of the Millennium INDUSTRIAL CULTURE AND IDENTITYThe culture of manufacture has its roots in everyday life. In the guild manufactories renowned in history, and later within industrial working-class families, traditions of expertise, working methods and special techniques have been passed down from […]

Industrial architectural heritage – re-evaluating research parameters for more authentic preservation approaches

1. INDUSTRIALISATION – IMPACTS ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF ARCHITECTURE AND SPACEIn terms of social development, industrialization represents the greatest change of all, not only because of the altered methods of production, but also because of its effects on all aspects of life. Industrialisation or the Industrial Revolution, as it is often called due to the […]

Vibrations in the Iinterlude

A few Notes on the Current Situation of Post-War Industrial Aarchitecture in the Czech Republi The increasingly frequent attempts to point out the importance of industrial buildings and the possibility of their use in a new perspective have, through expert discussions, publications, exhibitions and through various initiatives of a number of groups and associations as […]

Heritage, Culture and Regeneration of the Former Military Areas in the City of Oradea, Romania

There are places where history is still alive: heritage sites, locations of great cultural, scientific, educational, and social significance. The military presence in the city of Oradea, Romania, generated an impressive cultural-historical heritage, both tangible and intangible, as the consequence of centuries of alternative militarization and demilitarization processes. The aim of the article is to […]

Tito’s Villas in Herceg Novi – Regional Contexts and State Residences

Considering the growth trends of cities within specific regional contexts, the focus of this paper is the contemporary architecture of the bay of Boka Kotorska, a World Heritage region protected by UNESCO. The youngest and largest town is Herceg Novi located at the entrance of the bay. Against the attractive setting of the coastal and […]

Zdeněk Řihák’s Hotel Buildings and the State Project Institute of Trade Brno

The text briefly describes the operation of one of the state planning establishments for hotel construction in Czechoslovakia from 1960 to 1990, placing the architectural work of SPITB employee Zdeněk Řihák within the global context of that time. The Czechoslovak hotel production and the work of Zdeňek Řihák is analysed on for case studies: Hotel […]

Socialist Industrialization as a Factor of Urban Development and a Difficult Legacy in Košice, Slovakia

The postwar decades were significant for urban development in Central and Eastern Europe since many cities grew rapidly and were industrialized. The Slovak city of Košice illustrates how industrial entities’ localization catalyzes urban development. The development in the years after 1945 changed the city character from middle size provincial town into a large industrial city. […]

The City as a Place Prepared for Neurodiversity

This study aims to analyse and reflect on the relationship between architecture and human neurodiversity. Individuals with different cognitive capabilities perceive and use space and it’s elements differently. Despite the fact that modern medicine has positively contributed toward and shift in social paradigm towards mental health and its impairments, the level of stigmatisation in the […]

The Experiential Museum – Avant-Garde Spatial Experiments and the Reorganization of the Human Sensorium

Avant-garde artistic experiments are unquestionably recognized as relevant to the museum field in the context of art and museum studies. This paper aims to reconfirm their relevance in the architectural context as well, selecting crucial cases and protagonists whose final products were not artworks or exhibitions per se, but new (concepts of) space. These new […]

Lotte Stam-Beese (1903 – 1988) From Entwurfsarchitektin to Urban-planning Architect

The paper takes a closer look at the career of the Silesian-born urban-planning architect Lotte Stam-Beese. This female architect became famous not only in the Netherlands, but also in the circles associated with CIAM, for her designs for modern post-war housing districts in the city of Rotterdam. An initial basis for Stam-Beese’s career was laid […]

Industrial Heritage Utilization

A specific modernist building typology, namely the transformer stations that arose with the introduction and spread of electric power usage in the first half of the 20th century, forms the topic for examination in this paper from the architectural and urban-planning points of view. In addition to providing research on this developing period in Budapest, […]

Conservation Challenges for mid-20th Century Houses in Peripheral Scotland

Whilst Scotland’s postwar urban planning and mass housing are well documented, the historiography of mid-20th century architecture consists otherwise of relatively few monographs on renowned architects. The history of architect-designed houses is insufficiently researched, despite the existence several outstanding buildings scattered across the country. This paper discusses three such Modernist houses, erected between 1959 – […]

The Problem of the House in 1960s Belgrade: Mediating the Individual and the Collective

Focusing on the architecture and ambience of the low-rise high-density single-family housing estate Petlovo Brdo in Belgrade, Serbia (1967 – 1969), the article relates the everyday social production of space in socialism as a modernist-vernacular fusion of the notions of the folkloric and the peripheral. The socio-spatial balance between the individual and the communal, as […]

Red or Blue? The Start of Modern Planning in Bratislava

This study presents the history of modern urban planning in Bratislava (then Pozsony/Pressburg) at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. It identifies the first three plans for regulation and enlargement of the city: the plan by the City Technical Division from 1898 through 1906, the plan of the retired construction commissioner of Hungarian […]

Changes of Town Centres in the Era of State Socialism – Processes and Paradigms in Urban Design

Approaches towards town centres in various eras are highly revealing of the contemporary way of thinking and the pervasive ideas about the past and the future. During the state socialist era, the standpoint was highly unstable, constantly changing according to major shifts in economic and social politics throughout the 45-year life of the regime. These […]

Where is French Urban Design Headed? The Involvement of Private Investors in the Plannning and Implementation of Large-scale Urban Development Projects