Janáček Cultural Centre in Brno - response from Mayor Petr Vokřál

Dear Mr. Architect,

I am responding to your letter dated September 24 of this year. I cannot hide that I was surprised by the form of communication you chose. A public open letter is, in my opinion, a last possible solution that should be resorted to when one party does not respond to calls for negotiations. However, such a situation has not occurred in the discussed matter; both parties have publicly declared their willingness to communicate and resolve the situation.

On September 19, I addressed you with an offer to negotiate. You declined this meeting due to the pre-election period, as you were concerned about the politicization of the matter.

I was even more surprised that only a few days later, still during the pre-election period, you wrote an open letter. This undoubtedly led to the politicization that you yourself were worried about.

Your letter contained 7 questions for which you require answers. Since a personal meeting did not take place even after the elections, I consider it appropriate to at least briefly respond in as much detail as is possible in written communication. I will number my responses in line with your questions.

I am simultaneously sending this letter with a request for publication to the editorial office of Archiweb, so that the public can become acquainted with the answers to the published inquiries.

1) You state that the procurement procedure for selecting a project documentation processor included only one offer. The situation is, however, different; there were two offers, one of which was from the JKC Brno Project Association, of which the company Atelier M1 s.r.o. is a member, where the authors are partners and managers. However, you did not provide the required qualifications. The procurement procedure has been concluded, and any further questions are now irrelevant. For completeness, I also state that the statutory city of Brno was not the contracting authority for the order.
2) An alternative proposal does not constitute a violation of the license agreement. This agreement actually anticipates its creation. The author of the alternative concept is the designers, which you yourself state in your lawsuit filed against us in the meantime, thus my answer is apparently superfluous.
3) With a high degree of probability, none of the options will be without impacts on UR No. 222. This impact will also be present in the variant that you authored and which will fully connect to the DUR. This fact is evident and was confirmed by you in the author’s manual. I consider all authors of the documentation for the territorial decision primarily responsible for this fact, including both you and the designers. However, in my opinion, the main factual role is played by the fact that the construction was phased, and the air conditioning of the hall generally was not the focus of the DUR.
4) You are arguing in the media against the alternative material that is currently in the study stage and is not the only result of the designers' activities. As for working trips, they took place in the spring months of 2015. I do not interfere with the design team's work in a way that would dictate or limit the quantity and objectives of such trips. I also believe that if the working team is accompanied by experts, they would certainly not engage in unnecessary actions. After all, you yourself, Mr. Architect, participated in several of these trips—you were part of delegations to Poland, Denmark, Norway, and England, and you did not raise any objections against the objectives, contents, or scopes of the trips.
5) We based our findings on the text part of the DUR by the authors you provided. From this documentation, it follows that the size limitation was caused by the inability to resolve multiple parking spaces in the vicinity (I quote literally: “... the calculated capacity is given by the capacity of the underground garage...” end of quote), which changed with the occupancy permit of Domini Park. I further quote: “... if the transportation of the audience is provided by public transport or buses, etc., the hall is dimensioned and accessible for up to 1,600 spectators”). Both quotes are from page 29 of the text part of the DUR, authored by Ing. Arch. Jan Hájek, Ing. Arch. Jakub Havlas, Mgr. akad. arch. Pavel Joba within: Atelier M1 architects s.r.o. Therefore, it is surprising that you comment on the volume of the hall for a capacity of 1,300 people with regard to the DUR, as we return to the documentation you processed. Here you also partially find an answer to the question of who is responsible for the necessity to address changes in the DUR.
6) Your assumptions suggest to the client that they will opt for the version of the alternative. However, I must state that no such decision has yet been made. I cannot comment on your calculations of size and costs in any way. You have not yet sent your counter-proposal in violation of the license agreement; you even stated that you would not be preparing it.
7) The destruction of any artistic work is merely your assumption. Your thesis that the concrete object of the underground garage is an authorial and artistically autonomous work of art is generally mentioned for the first time in the lawsuit filed, among other things, against the statutory city of Brno. This interpretation is a novelty for me, and I lack a description of artistically autonomous authentic artistic elements of the garages and how they are to be destroyed for its analysis. At the same time, for such elements, I request their precise designation and identification of specific performing artists who created them, or who directed these performing artists and determined the specific intended elements of their work, since these are individuals who are involved in authorship.

In addition to my responses, please provide a list of all natural persons, authors of the work, as it appears from the materials presented to me that you have extensively utilized subcontractors in the performance of the work, and these, as such, bear an undeniable part of the authorship.