<translation>Ještěd in a Cage 2009 - Award Ceremony</translation>

On June 23, the second round of the student competition Ještěd f kleci took place at the Faculty of Arts and Architecture in Liberec. This competition was revived last semester after 4 years to serve as a final punctuation mark for students' semester projects. The winter edition was very successful, so it was decided to repeat the competition in the summer semester as well. The jury was chaired by Professor Miroslav Masák, with his colleagues being Kamila Amblerová (KA architekti) and Jan Duda (Studio Artikl). Their tasks were slightly less demanding compared to the winter semester due to the fact that dozens of graduating bachelor's and master's students did not participate in the competition. The jury approached the evaluation very strictly and responsibly, but for this reason, they are invited to FUATUL – students deserve external reflection that is absolutely independent. The awarded projects were to be divided into several categories – house, urbanism, design, and theory. The jury decided to change the experiment category to the theory category, as they recognized that none of the projects were sufficiently experimental; instead, they found some projects to be more about analyses and theory. After viewing and evaluating the projects, the jurors decided to nominate and thus highlight several projects in each category. In the final round, they decided not to award prizes in the house and theory categories, as they believed that none of the projects deserved the first prize in these categories. Up until this point, the consensus among the jurors was straightforward. After that followed complicated and difficult decision-making on who would be the absolute winner of the JFK competition, whom they had to choose. They had at their disposal the project of Václav Toufar (atelier Jiří Buček) for urbanism – a multifunctional block in Munich, and also Jiří Gulbis's (atelier Zdeňka Fránka) design for a footbridge over Jelení příkop, which eventually became the absolute winner of the summer Ještěd f kleci. Unfortunately, neither of the winners was present at the award ceremony, so they missed out on a vegetable party supported by plenty of good wine and a strawberry cake shaped like Ještěd with the JFK prize on top.

Jitka Pucandlová