<meta charset="UTF-8"> <title>Ferdinand Milučký Passed Away</title> <p>Architect Ferdinand Milučký has passed away.</p>

Bratislava - At the age of 89, one of the most significant Slovak architects of the second half of the 20th century, Ferdinand Milučký, passed away on Friday.
The last farewell will take place on Thursday, August 1, at 11:00 am at the crematorium in Bratislava, which is considered his masterpiece. His relatives confirmed this.
Ferdinand Milučký was engaged not only in architecture but also in preservation work in heritage environments, urbanism, interior design, and exhibition design.
Among his well-known and acclaimed projects are the Crematorium and urn grove in Bratislava, the House of Arts in Piešťany, and the Trávniky housing estate in Bratislava.
He also contributed to the buildings of Czechoslovak, now Slovak, embassies in Moscow and Rome. For a long time, he worked on projects in the heritage-protected environment of Bratislava Castle and its surroundings.
He was born on September 26, 1929, in Rajec in a family of a tinsmith. After graduating from the gymnasium in Žilina, he studied at the Faculty of Architecture of the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava.
According to his own words, he struggled for quality throughout his creative life. This struggle of Milučký is reflected in many of his works.
One of his most acclaimed works is the Crematorium and urn grove in Bratislava, which is a national cultural monument. He worked on the project of the Bratislava crematorium, the first in Slovakia, from 1962 until 1968.
The crematorium bears all the characteristic signs of Milučký's perception of architecture, where the principle of several parallel walls dominates. His goal was to create the most abstract architecture, free from construction details.
"The crematorium is a unique story in my life. In May 1962, my mother died, and in the summer I already had sketches of the crematorium on the table. I knew I would make it simple, extremely abstract. It was an atypical composition from the ground up; everything at the time was typical and standard, yet I managed to push through the atypical," Milučký said in a 2015 interview with TASR.
Architect Matúš Dulla considers the crematorium not only a top building within Czechoslovak architecture but also an exceptional global architecture. He also wrote a publication on the Bratislava Crematorium titled "At the End of the Road: The Crematorium in Bratislava."
"The works of Ferdinand Milučký are excellent examples of pure modernism in its late, mature form. None of our architects have penetrated the purifying artistic force so deeply into composition, tectonics, or building detail. Milučký understands architecture as an exclusive artistic act and prioritizes artistry over other, albeit functional, architectural considerations," Dulla assessed.
The exceptional Slovak architect Ferdinand Milučký also received many awards. In 1964, he received the Dušan Jurkovič Award for interior and exhibition design at the House of Books in Bratislava.
Two years later, he was awarded the same prize for urbanism in the project of the Trávniky housing estate in Bratislava.
Milučký was also awarded the Dušan Jurkovič Award in 1967 for the Crematorium and urn grove in Bratislava and for interior design (Slovak restaurant, Kinoautomat) for the World Expo "67 in Montreal.
In 1971, he received the Dušan Jurkovič Award again for the Social House in Moscow. For the House of Arts in Piešťany, he was awarded the minister of construction's prize in 1980.
His work on the reconstruction and interiors of the treasury at Bratislava Castle was also awarded in 1988 by the Union of Slovak Architects.
Ferdinand Milučký received the Emil Belluš Award for lifetime achievement in 1993, and in 1999, the University of Vienna awarded him the Johann Gottfried Herder Prize for architecture in the European context.
The President of the Slovak Republic, Ivan Gašparovič, honored Ferdinand Milučký in 2005 with the Ľudovít Štúr Order, 2nd class, for architecture and art.