Case of Kladno Station - Open Letter

Open Letter from Mirko Baum to the Minister of Transport regarding the Kladno Railway Station Case

Dear Mr. Minister, dear Mr. Kupka!

We meet again through this letter, and once again it concerns the rescue of a historically valuable object, the railway station building in Kladno threatened with demolition.
Probably no cultural epoch of European construction activity has achieved greater aesthetic homogeneity than that of the public buildings of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. From Chernivtsi in Bukovina to the northern Italian Trieste, we find in the buildings of post offices, schools, hospitals, barracks, and railway stations structures that are related to each other through their functional architecture and initially also through the unification of their equipment. The interwar European modernity often referred to as “functionalism” reached its greatest flourishing precisely in buildings of this type, quietly and without noisy proclamations.
Thonet chairs, telegraphs, and rotary phones had to yield over time to the pressure of modernization, but the architecture uniquely survived and still forms an unobtrusive yet important part of what we have come to call Europe.
The Kladno railway station (just like the recently exemplary renovated Prague - Vršovice station) is almost a textbook example of the “golden age” of the Austro-Hungarian railways. Its demolition would be an irreplaceable loss, difficult to explain to our descendants.

With perfect respect,
Prof. Mirko Baum, Hauptstrasse 112A, D-52159 Roetgen
March 6, 2024