Galegion: Utopian City - Exhibition at DOX

Exhibition authors: Leoš Válka, Petr Hájek
Opening: Thursday, February 13, 2020, at 7:00 PM
Location: DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, Poupětova 1

Galegion is the title of a ten-year research project by students of the Faculty of Architecture of CTU in Prague and the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava in the studios of Professor Petr Hájek (Studio Hájek/Hulín FA CTU, Studio Hájek/Rypáková AFAD). The research focuses on finding new methods of urban design and tests them in various specific locations.
The exhibition, which will last at DOX Centre from February 14 to May 25, 2020, will present this research through selected projects of utopian cities. The title of the exhibition is also the name of one of these "composed cities," which integrates an institution of a film archive, a museum, and a gallery. The term galegion, which encompasses and simultaneously covers these three meanings, was coined by mathematician and theorist Ivan M. Havel. Other projects presented in the exhibition include a city composed for the lunar crater Shackleton, which is intended to serve as a base for permanent human habitation on the Moon, the project of the Guggenheim Museum in Salzburg – an underground city carved into the rock mass to a depth of 150 m – a doctoral research project of the linear city by Nikola Slováková, or the project of the artificial island Adriaport off the Adriatic coast connected to the Czech Republic by a 400 km long tunnel, designed in 1977 at Pragoprojekt under the leadership of Professor Karel Žlábek, which was not realized due to Soviet intervention.
The theoretical background for some of these projects was provided by architecture theorists Professor Monika Mitášová and Professor Marián Zervan. Joint debates on these issues also led to the first assignment of the "house of the city," later named Galegion.
In 2015, a project called urbo kune was created in the studio based on a challenge from Austrian theorist Jan Tábora and his idea for a new capital of the European United States, designed not based on typologies, but composed like music. The writer Miloš Urban was so inspired by the city's project that he wrote the novel Urbo Kune, which is set there.
“We feel a strong need for utopia as an environment for defining basic hypotheses. Utopia has received an unflattering label of fantastic architecture in the Czech higher education environment. I encounter the opinion that these ideas are not useful for the architect's practice. However, it is exactly the opposite. Most of our realized buildings would not have come into existence without utopias,” explains Petr Hájek. His distinctive and experimental creativity, with overlaps into various fields (music, dance, mathematics, etc.), has been recognized by the jury of the Czech Chamber of Architects, which awarded him the title Architect of the Year in 2018.

Petr Hájek was born in 1970 in Karlovy Vary. He studied at the Faculty of Architecture at the Czech Technical University in Prague and the School of Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. In 1998, he founded, together with Tomáš Hradečný and Jan Šépka, the architectural office HŠH architects, and in 2009, his own architectural office Petr Hájek ARCHITEKTI. Among the most famous realized buildings are: Upper Square in Olomouc (1), Jiřské Square at Prague Castle (2), Archdiocesan Museum Olomouc (3), modifications of the castle hill in Litomyšl (courtyard, park, riding hall, carriage house, multifunctional hall; 4), Krkonošské Center for Environmental Education KCEV (5), expansion of the Center for Contemporary Art with the DOX+ building (6), reconstruction of the water tower in Prague 7 (7), or the terraces of the Lucerna Palace (8). These works have received numerous national and international awards (Grand Prix award of the Architects' Association, European Freiraum Award no2, Bauwelt–Preis, Building of the Year, The Old Prague Club Award, R. Eitelberger Award, European Piranesi prize /honorable mention/, four-time Czech nomination for the European Mies van der Rohe Award, Sustainable Architecture Award Ferrara /honorable mention/).
Petr Hájek has been a lecturer at the Faculty of Architecture CTU in Prague since 2004, where he was appointed professor in 2017. Since 2012, he has also led a design studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava. He is the founder and chairman of the board of the Art-Now Foundation for the support of art and talent and the founder of the LEA – Laboratory of Experimental Architecture association. For his pedagogical work in the field of urbanism research titled "anastomosis," he received the Rector's Award of CTU in 2012 for the application of research in practice. He is the author of exhibitions in the Czech Republic and abroad (Prague, Brno, Liberec, Oslo, Vienna, Paris, London, Bratislava, Venice). In 2018, he was awarded by the Czech Chamber of Architects as Architect of the Year 2018.

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