Significant British award for Dalibor Veselý

Professor Dalibor Veselý, architect and educator, became the recipient of the prestigious British award Annie Spink Award at the end of last year. This biennial award is granted by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) to individuals who have significantly enriched the world of architectural education in the United Kingdom. Previous laureates of this award include Elia Zenghelis (2000) and Wolf Prix (2004).
Dalibor Veselý, a graduate of the Faculty of Architecture in Prague (having studied under Oldřich Stefan and Karel Honzík, and later at the Academy of Fine Arts with Jaroslav Fragner) and the Faculty of Arts at Charles University (though he claims that discussions with Jan Patočka have influenced him the most), has been teaching at the University of Cambridge in the UK for over a quarter of a century, as well as being a visiting professor at leading technical institutions across Europe and abroad. On the occasion of this prestigious award, the Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences, together with the Faculty of Architecture of the Czech Technical University, recently organized a soirée for colleagues and personal friends of Professor Veselý. Among those present were, among others, doc. Lubomír Konečný and Petr Kratochvíl from the Institute of Art History, prof. Ladislav Lábus, Jan Sedlák, Oldřich Ševčík, and Ondřej Beneš from the Faculty of Architecture of the Czech Technical University, sculptor Aleš Veselý, architects Jan Matyáš, Radim Ullman, and others.
After a brief laudatory speech by Lubor Konečný, Professor Veselý responded shortly. He noted that the prestigious award he received is primarily perceived as recognition of activities that have their roots in the 1960s, when he collaborated mainly with three groups of colleagues and friends in Prague, including architects Karel Kouba, Jan Matyáš, and Jan Štěpaník, artists Mikuláš Medek, Jan Koblasa, Karel Nepraš, and Aleš Veselý, and art historians František Smejkal, Bohumír Mráz, Eliška Fučíková, and others. On the occasion of acknowledging Veselý's influence on Czech culture, it is also important to mention his significant contribution to the shaping of Czech architectural magazines such as Architekt (2000-2005) and Ad architektura (2006).

Among the personalities who supported the awarding of the Annie Spink Award to Professor Veselý was the legendary Kenneth Frampton. We publish in full the recommendation letter he managed to obtain.

Honorable RIBA Council

It is an honor for me to be invited to nominate the stated candidate for this year's laureate of the RIBA Annie Spink Award. Professor Veselý has been my close colleague in the field of architectural history, theory, and criticism for the last twenty-five years since I asked him to write a critical summary of my book Modern Architecture: Critical History, when it was first published in 1980.
Although he has leaned towards written appreciation, he nonetheless provided me with an insightful response to what later became the final chapter of the first edition, which, as I have since discovered, represented more or less a conventionally established didactic way of Dalibor's participation.
On this occasion, he advised me that the topics I opened in the final section of my book are actually addressed in a broader and more exhaustive way by Paul Ricoeur in his essay Universal Civilization and National Cultures from 1961.
This advice became crucial, as reading Ricoeur's essay inspired me in 1978 to formulate my critical polemic: Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance, which was published in Anti-aesthetics by Hal Foster in 1983. It is a defining position that sparked a significant debate in the second half of the 1980s and continues to enjoy it, particularly in the so-called Third World.
I mention this event because from my perspective it is not only a dramatic example of Dalibor's exceptional intellectual standing in the field but also a sign of his provocative didactic method as such.
Upon arriving in Britain, Dalibor Veselý began to develop his parti pris in a course collaborating with Professor Joseph Rykwert in introducing a foundational PhD program in the history and theory of architecture at the University of Essex, which produced significant doctoral candidates and graduates such as Nicholas Adams, Alberto Pérez-Gómez, David Leatherbarrow, Daniel Libeskind, and Simmon Pepper.
He also successfully taught workshops, history, and theory at the Architectural Association School under Alvin Boyarsky until 1978, when he moved to the faculty of the School of Architecture at the University of Cambridge.
Veselý's full maturity and pedagogical success, with prior training both architecturally and philosophically, became an important contribution during his teaching at Cambridge, where he educated a successful generation of brilliant and engaged architects, historians, and theorists of architecture.

Dalibor is a persistent critic of instrumental and purely technical thinking in architecture, as well as contemporary tendencies to reduce architecture to speculative, media manifests. In his teaching, he maintains a similar distance, I would say, from the building as signature of Frank Gehry's school, as well as from the reductive high-tech machine. He has a consistently sensitive and critical viewpoint, heavily inspired by the phenomenological discourse of Hans-Georg Gadamer, as articulated in his book Truth and Method. The most comprehensive illumination of Veselý's critical stance can subsequently be found in his recent brilliant synoptic study Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation, following his book Architecture and Continuity from 1978.
There is no doubt that he is one of the most prolific and ethical educators in the British architectural tradition of the last two decades, and thus his proper recognition by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) is rightfully expected.
For this reason, I would like to strongly recommend him as a candidate for this year's Annie Spink Award without any reservations.

Sincerely
Kenneth Frampton
Professor of Architecture

September 22, 2006