The dean of the Faculty of Architecture is listed on the wall of fame in Delft

Prague - The name of the dean of the Faculty of Architecture at CTU, Zdeněk Zavřel, is inscribed on the wall of fame at the Delft University of Technology, the oldest technical university in the Netherlands. Last year, a fire destroyed the local Faculty of Architecture, and an architectural competition is underway for a new school. A wall of fame dedicated to European and overseas architects has sprung up at the faculty's temporary headquarters.
    Among the 113 names is the Czech architect and educator Zavřel, who taught in Delft during his Dutch exile, reported Jiří Horský, editor of the faculty bulletin Alfa, to ČTK.
    Representatives of the Delft school selected the mentioned number of names from authorities throughout the history of architecture. "This gallery should not lack those who have connected their mission with the Netherlands’ most significant breeding ground for 'art of building'," said Horský. Zavřel, who worked at the school in the 1980s, trained a number of today's leading Dutch architects.
    Zavřel studied architecture at CTU in Prague in 1966 and obtained his second engineering degree in Delft in 1983. He then worked at this school for several years as a teacher and researcher.
    His professional beginnings were at the Liberec Sial with architects Miroslav Masák and Karel Hubáček. After going into exile in the late 1970s, he established himself at the world-famous office in Rotterdam, Van den Broek en Bakema, and in the 1980s, opened his own office there. In the 1990s, he participated in the beginnings of the Association of Architects in the Czech Republic and in 1998 received the Association of Architects Award for his work.
    Zavřel's work touches on many building typologies. In addition to the main theme of urban housing, he focused on school buildings; in recent years he has also dealt with administrative and representative buildings, such as the Dutch embassy building in Ghana. Besides his design activities, research in sustainable development is also among Zavřel's interests.
    His designs have been awarded in numerous competitions. In 1978, he won a prize in a competition for the renovation of the Main Train Station in Prague (together with John Eisler, Dalibor Vokáč, and Emil Přikryl), won awards in competitions for several residential complexes in the Netherlands, triumphed in the European Union competition on the use of solar energy in housing, received first prize in a national competition for an urban school in the port areas of Amsterdam (realized in 1992), and won the competition for the Czech Cultural Center in Paris, which was built according to his design in 1997.
    In the 1990s, he became the secretary of the Czechoslovak Architectural Foundation (Association of Czech and Slovak Architects Abroad), of which Jan Kaplický was the honorary president. From this position, he tried to apply knowledge in the area of residential construction from the Netherlands in the Czech Republic.
    In 2007, he was appointed associate professor in the field of architecture at VUT Brno; this year, he completed the professorship process and, after the decision of the Scientific Council of VUT Brno, was proposed for appointment as a professor.