Architektúra & Urbanizmus – JOURNAL
The journal publishes research results in the fields of architecture and urban planning.
Though small in size, Slovakia is rich in its springs of natural healing water. These springs are an important precondition for the development of the spa as a social institution, yet natural resources alone cannot provide all the services of a spa. For the providing of therapy, what is necessary is a complex of balneology […]
BBalaton’s waves brought consolidation in even wider circles” – this quote from the famous lyrics of a song entitled “The Sixties” confirms that the development of the largest lake in CentralEurope had a pivotal role in the social policies intended to reestablish the socialist system in Hungary after the 1956 revolution. In parallel with the […]
Nová Ostrava, later called Ostrava-Poruba, is the most notable example of a new industrial city founded and constructed in the period of early socialism in Czechoslovakia after World War II. The particular mode of architectural forms, which is strongly evident in the plans of the new city and significantly affected its initial part constructed between […]
The paradigm of the city is now undergoing substantial change against a background of economic, technological and social transformations caused by globalization. The traditional postindustrial city is to be replaced by the city characterized by such attributes as green, sustainable, open, rational, ecological, ideal, creative, global, and generic… – and the notion of Smart City […]
The study addresses the importance of the third scholarly conference organised in the 1950s by ÚSTARCH SAV under the title On the Scientific Problems of Architecture. The initiator of the conference was academician Emil Belluš, who invited important Czech and Slovak architects as well as art historians. The conference was divided into two thematic blocks […]
The aim of this paper was to undertake an analysis of the modes of reference of architectural meanings. For the purpose of the analysis, categories of meanings are defined relying on the work of Nelson Goodman and Erwin Panofsky. The proposed method was tested on the example of two buildings: the Yugoslav pavilion at EXPO […]
The article investigates the representation of Western (West-European and Amer¬ican) urban planning in the professional architectural press in Czechoslovakia during the turbulent period of the early years of the communist regime in 1945 – 1960. Focusing on media discourse, the study discusses the transfer of architectural and urban design concepts within postwar Europe and ques¬tions […]
Architektúra & urbanizmus, as a journal published quarterly by a scholarly institution and declaratively focused on the theory of architecture, urban design and human environments, has represented from its very outset a well-anchored space for the discussion of contemporary architecture. In contrast to the monthly publications like the Slovak journal Projekt or its Czech counterpart […]
The study outlines the form, contents and course of discussions on contemporary architecture in the journal throughout its half-century of publication. Using a basic art-historical categorisation of texts as historiographic, theoretical and critical, the study situates the main themes of each period’s architectonic discussion. It shows that an interest in summary historical texts, which were […]
What were the subjects of the contributions published by the journal Architektúra & urbanizmus during its half-century of existence? The present study discusses the importance of the founding personalities (Emanuel Hruška, Tibor Zalčík and Richard Kittler), notes the conception of its program, and specifically treats the most striking shift in the journal’s history, in the […]
INTRODUCTIONThe Greek term kinema signifies motion or movement, while contemporary contextualization of the notion cinema denotes the architectural space in which we become part of the visual system that allows us to perceive a sense of movement and which moves us. As the notion cinematic space presupposes an integrated temporality, and since temporality is traditionally […]
The starting point for the cultural interpretation of an architectural work with respect to its potential revitalization can assume a decisive role in terms of determination of the guidelines for evaluation, protection and/or revitalization of architectural heritage. Starting in the 19th century, when the fundaments of a theory of architectural heritage were laid down, two […]
The Lisbon headquarters and park of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (FCG), located in the Parque de Santa Gertrudes, created the public image of the Gulbenkian Foundation: an expression of culture that became synonymous in Portugal with social progress and thus a sign of a new monumentality. This aspiration was defined at the outset by its […]
In our thinking about the city and about city regulations, land-use and/or spatial planning, several independent lines of argument have emerged. One of them is the artistic-compositional stance, derived from the traditional central principle of architectonic creation, focusing on the production of an aesthetically pleasing functional-structural whole. This result has the character of an inclusive […]
FORMULATION OF THE PROBLEMLinear landscaping structures occupy a special position among the range of urban green areas. Running through particular parts of the city, they form relatively narrow but elongated strips of urban greenery. This scheme of planning provides the residents of the neighborhoods with a brief daily recreation, gathering them in the local areas, […]
he future of large prefabricated housing estates is one of the key problems of sustainable urban development in post-Communist countries. In Western Europe, there are only 1.8 million such flats; in the countries, however, which lie between the former East Germany and the Russian Far East, there are more than 53 million panel flats, inhabited […]
The text addresses the issue of the spatial arrangement of new office and residential complexes built in the inner part of Prague during the post-socialist time. After 1990, the transformation of the Eastern bloc state of Czechoslovakia into the present Czech Republic led to the implementation of major economic and social changes, as reflected in […]
States are born from certain visions; they are formed and legitimised by them. Cities as well form their own visions, and they attempt to project them in development concepts and strategies. In the history of Czech cities, the footprints of visions linked to strategic decisions can be noted in particular when radical changes of their […]
Emmanuel Levinas (1906 – 1995), one of the greatest phenomenologically oriented philosophers of the 20th century, is not an author whom we encounter often when reading texts about architecture. Despite his extensive body of writings on art, he never produced any text directly concerning architecture. However, if we measure the importance of works by other […]
The title of this paper refers to the polarity between formalism and reception aesthetics, emerging in the 1960s yet implicitly formulated much sooner, for example in Czech and Slovak structuralism. The aim of this text is to demonstrate how this polarity shaped the contextual background of architectural thinking in the second half of the 20th […]
The present paper is concerned with the interpretational procedures in Peter Eisenman’s book Ten Canonical Buildings. This book offers ten interpretations of architectural works from the period between the years 1950 – 2000 as well as a meta-interpretation of these interpretations. This latter meta-interpretation has both ontological and architectural-historiographical consequences, as it inevitably touches upon […]
The present study devotes attention to the activities of the women architects who were the first graduates of the Faculty of Architecture and Construction at the Slovak Technical University in Bratislava and started their careers in design work in the midpoint of the 20th century. Through several personalities selected on the basis of their authorial […]
The significance of historic events is never unequivocally clear, but instead always subject to change along with the methods of their understanding. In every era, the problem of producing historiography invariably rises again and again, and thus history always needs, in a sense, to be rewritten. Even art history cannot interpret a work of art […]
During the period that has elapsed since the publication of the present author’s previous survey (Dulla, Matúš: Personalities and influences. Contribution to the study of modern architecture in Slovakia. Architektúra & urbanizmus 41, 2008, 1 – 2, pp. 5 – 20), a significant shift has been noticed in the practice of Slovak architectural monographs. In […]
The paper focuses on the problem of the public or architectural interpretation and reception of two extraordinary buildings: the combined hotel and television tower on Mt. Ještěd near Liberec and the Žižkov Television Tower in Prague. The paper is divided into three chapters: 1) Architecture and the Historic Context, 2) Architecture and the Topological (Landscape […]
The critical potential of “total installations”— the logic of Ilya KabakovThis paper focuses on the analysis of the installation Ten Characters by Ilya Kabakov, as this artwork is considered as a crucial instance in interpreting Soviet narratives and figures as a metaphor for life in the Soviet Union. The paper shows that Kabakov draws attention […]
In the conditions of current globalization trends, the creation of a new European political and spatial context and the expression of regional cultural differences, a need has emerged to redefine cultural and urban identity. Spatial-cultural identity is particularly strong in settings enriched by a recognisable geo-climate and cultural and built heritage such as the Adriatic […]
The study represents the urban-planning work of the relatively unknown Moravian-born architect Josef Marek, a pupil of Jan Kotěra and a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. During his years in Slovakia after 1919 up until the end of the 1950s, Marek created an entire series of urban plans, though the form […]