Lead Dušan 2011 - Ing. arch. Jan Holna (DaM)

For writing down my observations and thoughts arising from my participation in the jury of this year's Lead Dusan, I deliberately forced myself to wait a few days. I have a few basic themes in my head, but just to be sure, I will open the previous yearbooks and quickly go through the profiles of my colleagues who were on the jury before me. I feel the weight of the short text I have to write. I don't want to look foolish compared to my predecessors and sit on the sidelines.

I shouldn't have done this!!! They write exactly about what I also wanted to write. How they haven't been at the FA for so many years (in my case, fourteen), how they left back then angry, not wanting to come back, and how they accepted participation in the jury while secretly hoping to see some real gems, rebellion, free thinking, but mainly... the future. What they actually saw, and what I also saw, my predecessors have already described in many diverse yet similar ways.

So what am I supposed to write about? For several years, perhaps several decades, everything has been the same, and any comments and observations regularly change nothing. Everyone hopes that it's the building that makes people jump when they're not in their skin. That a new building will change that, bringing positive vibes and tuning students and their professors to an optimal wavelength. But that won't happen. The new building is ideologically a good twenty years old, and students won't suddenly start organizing workshops, parties about architecture on architecture, and they won't want to reboot the world with a few kicks in the ass... what a shame. That small percentage of excellent "aťáci" won't save the school's reputation, but mainly, and this is what saddens me the most, it won't force students not to enroll in dreadful studios with zero ability to teach them anything.

In the jury, three of us from the same year, which among other things founded Dusan, met. From the second half of the first day, under the weight of "quality," we consider abolishing it. It seems to us that a competition meant to motivate students leads nowhere in the long run. In the end, we choose a less radical but still rebellious solution. We want to mark those studios that we believe are not worth visiting. The next day, six are eliminated from the voting entirely, and another seven are very close to the edge...

I don't want to end with the obligatory sentence that contains the word "hopefully" or "I hope." Just gather together at the faculty and prefer studios and teachers that are worth it. If you don’t know who that is, look into it and don’t settle for a warm spot in a boring studio that has been stagnating for several decades.