Fórum architektury & stavitelství

Fórum architektury - 3/2001 summary

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The Original or a Copy of the Architectural World
This thematic issue of Forum magazine intends to re-open the discussion on the possibility of founding a museum of architecture - an institution to date still lacking in Prague. The individual articles cover foreign experience in this area during recent decades, but above all ponder the motives and opportunities for setting up a similar institution in the Czech Republic.
B. F.
Museums and (or) Architectural Centres?
Institutions such as today´s museums of architecture were not yet being seriously considered even in the 1960s. Architectural exhibitions were for the most part comprised of photographs of ground plans prepared for the purpose of publication, while original architectural plans and drawings were only exhibited exceptionally. On a global scale, this was undoubtedly connected with the narrow and simplified interpretation of architecture in the spirit of the modernist doctrine of Bauhaus, which at that time increasingly revealing its weak spots, leading to the reaction against it in the 1970s. In the Czech atmosphere, the influence of the technocratic prefab strategies of so-called scientifically oriented architecture was being felt, which after Khrushchev´s speech on superfluity in architecture in the mid-1950s, and in the conditions of a state-monopolized economy, barred the free development of architecture.
Informed circles were aware of the fact that in the old hostel for war veterans in Karlín, where up until 1927 disabled veterans from the First World War still lived (one of whom was the photographer Josef Sudek), an annex of the National Technical Museum existed in the form of a large archive containing architectural plans and models. However, few actually realized - or realize even now - its true value.
Vladimír Šlapeta
Museums of Architecture as a Specific Issue and an Ideal Opportunity
In 1979, the Interanational Confederation of Architectural Museums (ICAM) was founded in Helsinki. Is general aim is to discover the ideal form of location in which architecture could be presented as something situated on a level equal to other permanent types of museums, such as those devoted to ethnography, transportation, industrial design and art history.
An important feature in these new trends in the 1980s was that of the variety of ideas on the concept of what this type of museum ought to be like: whether it should focus only on modern architecture (the most accessible archive material), create a gallery of plans, outlines and models, or concentrate on a multi-media centre, which is the most sophisticated in terms of form and content. Petr Ulrich
Studies in the NTM Archive
(sketches, drawings, plans and models)
The department of architecture and civil engineering at the National Technical Museum in Prague has been compiling documentation on the art of these two disciplines since the time it was founded. A long tradition of systematic collection, and of extensive and active contacts with professionals mediated up until the 1920s through so-called working groups of museum societies - has made it possible to gather an exceptional number of collections of high quality. Professionals have worked on these collections - among the most extensive in Central Europe - since the beginning of the 1940s, when the Archive of Architecture was founded. After the emergence of the department of architecture and civil engineering at the beginning of the 1970s, professional and exhibition activities in this field developed at the former hostel for war veterans in Karlín, despite the negative working and depositing conditions. The extensiveness of the collections is remarkable, and on a European scale altogether exceptional.
The long-term unfavourable situation surrounding the collections is generally known. It stems from the overall situation of the National Technical Museum, which only with the change of the political system in 1989 was able to develop capabilities and potential previously suppressed - form gradually reconstructing the main building at Letná and setting up new expositions, to its involvement in the new system of work and a number of exhibition projects, and its extensive cooperation on the international level. A museum of architecture that would gather, process, and make publicly accessible documentation and archival materials concerning architectural work in Bohemia has been under consideration since the 1940s.Through a favourable coincidence and the diligent work carried out by a professional team on the architecture of the Technical Museum, primary source materials have been gathered, particularly relating to the heritage of Czech architects and architectural models dating back to the origin of the museum in 1908. At the same time, artifacts from the field of the civil engineering (mainly from exhibitions and schools) were also gathered, and this has led to the creation of a unique set of collections capable of presenting both disciplines in documented interaction.
The idea for a museum of architecture was revived in the 1960s though especially after the establishment of the independent department of architecture and civil engineerong in 1972. Nevertheless, real hope for making the idea of an independent museum a reality has only been gained during the past decade.
Petr Krajči