Interview with Vladimír Šlápeta

On the Path to Architecture

Jan Kratochvíl: Your father was an outstanding architect, teaching at the university in Olomouc. When you chose your life's path, was architecture a genetically clear choice for you?
Vladimír Šlapeta: My father was an extraordinarily creative person, halted by the extraordinary adversity of the time. I cannot remember the time when there was still an architectural office, which originally was in our apartment in the so-called children's room, or the time when the office moved to a large apartment in the opposite house after the birth of my twin sister Olga and me in 1947. After the February coup, the whole society fell apart - some friends - for instance, the couple Josef and Malva Ander (ASO) were imprisoned by the communists, others were sent to wash dishes in the kitchen (for example, the owner of the smelly cheese factory), lawyers were sent to forced labor in Komárno or Mírov, and others moved abroad (for instance, Břetislav Jelínek, the chairman of the Moravian Rotary). My father was soon fired from the university after February. Most artists adapted. My father hated Stavoprojekty, so until 1958 he worked mostly alone, at home, on major projects through the Prague Fund for Visual Arts - for example, the renovations of theaters in Martin and Nitra, the summer theater in Piešťany, all interiors of the Ostrava department store Ostravica, or the renovation of the cinema to wide format in Krnov. This ended with his expulsion from the Union of Architects in June 1958, when this activity was forbidden to him (by the way, the comrades were careful to ensure that he was not allowed to work through the Architectural Service of the ČFVU until his death in 1983). It was more or less a lifelong ban on practicing his profession.
However, at home we were surrounded by architecture from all sides; my father left nothing to chance. For example, it was an experience even to paint the apartment, where they tried out color shades on the terrace for a long time to make everything fit, and the parents' bedroom always got different colors and surface compositions afterwards. We, as children, eagerly awaited that. Our family friends mostly included artists (for example, Alois Schneiderka from Wallachia, Karel Svolinský, Jan Zrzavý, Josef Vinecký, Vladimír Navrátil, Jára Šolc, Karel and Ota Lenhart) and musicians (conductors František Stupka and Josef Šoupal, organists prof. Reinberger and prof. Šlechta, members of the Czech nonet, etc.).
It was thought that my older brother Ivan, who drew excellently, would study architecture, but he ran away to film. I also loved drawing, succeeded at school, and liked literature, philosophy, and history. My decision also came at a time when the ice began to thaw somewhat in the years 1964-1965; my father met Richard Neutra again in July 1963 after years, and in November of the same year, he visited Hans Scharoun in Stuttgart and West Berlin after 27 years, bringing back a lot of new architectural literature, which certainly had an impact, so I enrolled in architecture.

JK: Did you admire any buildings in Olomouc and the surrounding area during your adolescence? Did they strengthen your decision to pursue architecture?
VŠ: Definitely. For instance, the Church of St. Moritz with beautiful organs of master Engler, under which we stood every Sunday in the gallery, or the plague column, fountains, and three domes of St. Michael. Childhood spent in the polarity between the historical monuments of Olomouc and the modern atmosphere of our home was very inspiring.

JK: What is your relationship with your birthplace today?
VŠ: I still go there because my 92-year-old mother still lives in our apartment. So it is still our home, where my father's creative energy can still be felt. For example, he could not stand playing on a piano designed by someone else, so he designed a Petrof piano himself. If Petrofa had not been nationalized after the war, he would have started producing this instrument in series.

JK: Why did you choose to study at the Prague faculty?
VŠ: From 1945-1958, the Brno faculty was undoubtedly the best in the country. This period ended with the dismissal of Professors Fuchs, Kopřiva, and Rozehnal, the latter of whom ended up in prison on Pankráci after a disgraceful trial. This began the infamous era of docent and rector Vladimír Meduna - a decline in standards and politicization of the school, from which the most capable assistants Ruller, Sirotek, Riedl, etc., left. Given my background and name, I had no chance at such a faculty dominated by Meduna, Alexa, and similar figures, and it wouldn’t have made sense either. That’s why I applied in Prague, which was culturally opening up more to the world - for example, the English director Peter Brook came to see Hamlet with Lukavský, Jean-Paul Sartre visited Prague, and in film, theater, and literature, a new wave of the Prague Spring was beginning to emerge with Kundera and Vaculík or Macháček and Krejča at the ND and Vostrý in the Činoherní klub. This has been in the air since at least 1962 and intensified since the autumn of 1965, when I began studying there.

JK: During your studies, the social situation dramatically changed, and many people chose exile. Did you consider this option as well?
VŠ: Of course. Since the end of the seventies, I had prepared and deposited materials for at least three publications abroad in case I had to emigrate. In 1982, I carried my birth certificate, high school diploma, index, and degree to Ljubljana, from which I sent everything to Austria, where I was later enrolled at the university in Innsbruck for my doctorate because my defense of the candidate’s dissertation in Prague was politically blocked for years. In the end, I could only graduate with my CSc. in 1987.
The fact that I didn't emigrate was also influenced by the fact that I had four children, and that was a big responsibility I didn't want to abandon. I considered emigration as a last resort. My father also did not leave in 1948 when my mother was afraid to leave with four small children.

On Exhibitions and Writing about Czech Architecture

JK: After graduation, you briefly worked as an architect, but very soon you started to deal with the history of Czech modern architecture. Why?
VŠ: In the last years of my studies, I was working on a study of buildings and projects by foreign architects in the Czech lands during the interwar period, and although this topic was not exactly politically welcome, I received the 1st prize in a national competition for student scientific works held in Brno at that time. This work was the first to point, for instance, to the villas of Lauterbach, Kulka, and Schoder in northern Bohemia, or to the buildings and projects of Peter Behrens, Walter Sobotka, Erich Mendelsohn, the Gessner brothers, and so on. At the same time, I helped Prof. B. Fuchs with research on Jan Kotěra's Vienna period, and Professor Fuchs tried to arrange a position for me as an assistant at the Brno University of Technology. He also promised me that he would entrust me with writing his monograph, which he wanted to publish with Prof. Wingler at the Bauhaus Archive. That was a great opportunity for me. Prof. Fuchs managed to write a recommendation letter to VUT, but soon after - in September 1972 - he unfortunately passed away, and the whole thing fell apart, also due to the unfavorable political developments during the normalization era. However, Professor Fuchs, like my father, advised me at the beginning to practice in design. So, I started in Ostrava, and alongside designing sports complexes and schools at work, I built several family houses for doctors and engineers. That was indeed a very important experience.

JK: Important in what sense?
VŠ: The practical experience of seeing how design transforms at the construction site into reality cannot be replaced by reading about it in books. It needs to be lived firsthand.

JK: When you became head of the architecture department at the NTM in 1973, was it a prestigious job?
VŠ: Certainly not. But it was Bohuslav Fuchs who pointed out to me the possibility of this job, and after his death, our Prague professor Jiří Štursa recommended me there. At that time, I already knew the architectural archive of the West Berlin Academy of Arts, managed by Scharoun's former assistant Peter Pfankuch, and I thought I would try to do something with it. Fortunately, they at the technical museum had no idea that the name Šlapeta in architecture was associated with political difficulties, that it should not appear in architectural print, because my father had been expelled from the Union of Architects, and my uncle emigrated in 1969. My teachers even advised me to change my name; otherwise, they said I couldn't begin anything in Czech architecture. This offended me quite a lot, and I did not do so; instead, I prepared retribution for that entire generation – for the imprisonment of Professor Rozehnal and many other architects – Tobka, Hilgert, Šolc, Rossmann, etc., whose lives were ruined by the communist regime. Until 1980, when it finally became possible to break the blockade of the ban on my name, which was closely monitored by comrades Vladimír Meduna and Antonín Drábek (the chairman and secretary of the Union of Architects), I published about 40 articles in Czech architectural magazines, which due to the aforementioned reason were only published under a cipher. I could publish under my own name only in the magazines Art and Craft and Monuments and Nature, and in Slovakia. Since the late 70s, however, I mostly published abroad, including Poland, Hungary, and the GDR.
Things at home became more interesting once a series of exhibitions was established, which attracted attention by the end of the 70s.

JK: Do you think our field has managed to cope with communist censorship and the deformation overall? Should "informational rehabilitation" have been supplemented with, for example, bans on the activities of discredited architects or another more radical "non-velvet" gesture?
VŠ: Some things have not yet been recalled - for example, the training of architects in Stavoprojekty in the spirit of socialist realism and the appointments of those who were the driving force behind these actions. Even the occupation period has not yet been sufficiently historically interpreted. I think the Poles or Hungarians have treated their past more sincerely. In our country, there are still many actors from those infamous times, so things are tactfully glossed over in Czech style.

JK: Do you think this could be a problem for the future or will it fade over time?
VŠ: In Bohemia, it will probably fade away again, but that's not good.

JK: Do you remember your first exhibitions?
VŠ: The first exhibition was dedicated to the sculptor and industrial artist Josef Vinecký,
who was a Czech student of Henry van de Velde and a friend of Alexej von Jawlensky and Paul Klee (he even allegedly owned a painting by Klee), who succeeded in rehabilitating him, and his sculptures and decorative arts were then purchased by the National Gallery, the B. Rejta Gallery, the Moravian Gallery, and the Olomouc Gallery. However, the director of NTM was very nervous about this exhibition, which I organized with the Olomouc gallery, and thus, as a sort of "punishment,"
he ordered me to mount an exhibition about newer architecture in Prague. However, he had no idea what I would do with it. I titled it "Prague in the 20th Century, Urban Transformations," and instead of a catalog, I published a book "Prague 1900-1978, A Guide to Modern Architecture," where almost 300 buildings from the 20th century were published for the first time with addresses and photographs. The guide sold out very quickly; today, it is offered by Western antiquarians as a rarity. That was a real breakthrough, and since then (thanks to my serious illness, the guide was delayed and came out in the autumn of 1979) my name was occasionally allowed to be discreetly mentioned. A parallel exhibition of Kamil Roškot was also prepared for the Olomouc gallery, which was another prestigious endeavor - many architects from Prague and Brno went to Olomouc to see Roškot’s phenomenal drawings (destroyed by floods today), and the exhibition was immediately requested by the Finnish Museum of Architecture (later also by the House of Art in Vienna and ETH in Zurich), and the catalog was reprinted by the leading international magazine Lotus International in Milan. The series of Olomouc exhibitions continued with monographs on Josef Kranz, Otakar Novotný, and in 1981 Arnošt Wiesner. Wiesner’s exhibition then enraged one influential comrade architect, who complained to the Krajský výbor KSČ in Ostrava that we (i.e., Pavel Zatloukal and I) were secretly promoting Zionism, which resulted in our exhibition series being banned.

JK: When you started preparing exhibitions on architecture, did you learn this "craft" or did you follow foreign exhibitions?
VŠ: By that time, I already knew various approaches to architectural exhibitions - for example, the exhibition of Freie Otto in Wrocław, contemporary architecture exhibitions in Vienna and Munich, and especially the exhibitions at the West Berlin Academy, which were conceived by Peter Pfankuch. For me, he was the greatest role model in how to work with documentation - sketches, plans, photographs, models, and texts. Pfankuch was the author of a large exhibition on the architectural avant-garde in West Berlin in 1977, the opening of which he did not live to see - he suffered from the same spinal disease as Karel Čapek (a consequence of imprisonment in a concentration camp and forced labor).

JK: Is there an "ideal monographic exhibition" of an architect or studio?
VŠ: Beautiful was, for example, the exhibition of Louis Kahn at MOMA or the exhibition of Carlo Scarpa in Vienna, which I think was installed by Boris Podrecca.

JK: What made these exhibitions beautiful?
VŠ: In the way of installation - Kahn's use of all possible means, while Scarpa's was reduced only to hundreds of sketches of the tomb, simply laid out on drawing tables.

JK: Currently, there are four galleries in the Czech Republic focused exclusively on architecture. Do you think this is a lot or a little?
VŠ: That might be enough, but there is no separate museum of architecture - if collections are under other institutions, it is difficult to promote an autonomous architectural program.

JK: Will it be possible to create such an institution?
VŠ: I wouldn't believe it much, especially since the opportunity was wasted just after 1990.

JK: Have you been impressed by any recent Czech exhibition with architectural themes?
VŠ: For example, the exhibition of Vlastislav Hofman at the Municipal House or the exhibition of Ivan Kroupa. Abroad, the exhibition "Mies in Berlin," installed in Schinkel's Old Museum in Berlin, or the exhibition by Rem Koolhaas in Mies' National Gallery in Berlin, and the exhibition of Max Berg in Wrocław.

JK: Why should people go to architectural exhibitions today? What different experience can a visitor gain from an exhibition compared to multimedia on the internet?
VŠ: The experience of the original and the interpretation of the creative process.

JK: You yourself still prepare exhibitions. The last one was, if I'm not mistaken, a monographic exhibition about Jan Hird Pokorný. Are you currently preparing another exhibition or publication?
VŠ: I have just completed a longer article about the Berlin housing estates, which was commissioned by the state heritage office in Berlin and which became part of the official proposal of six housing estates in Berlin for UNESCO World Heritage.

JK: Rostislav Švácha renounces the role of architectural theorist and rather sees himself as a historian. How do theory and history of architecture differ?
VŠ: Švácha's position is probably formulated correctly. The theorists are not those who interpret theories but those who create them.

JK: Do we have a theorist of architecture today in Czech architecture?
VŠ: In Rostislav Švácha, we certainly have a very competent interpreter of architectural theory.

On Architectural Education

JK: Shortly after the revolution, you became the dean of the Prague Faculty of Architecture. Did this event catch you prepared?
VŠ: I was nominated to the position of dean by Karel Hubáček and Jiří Suchomel. However, I was elected only after a year - in January 1991. That year was very useful; I looked around to see how things functioned here and whom I could rely on.
Since the second half of the 80s, the exhibition of Brno functionalism passed through 14 venues (mostly architecture schools) in Western Europe; Czech functionalism, which we prepared with Jan Kaplický, was at the AA in London, and since I was elected a member of the executive committee of the International Congress of Architectural Museums ICAM, I already had a fairly good overview of how architecture schools function in Western Europe and North America.
I also met several outstanding deans. At the forefront, I would like to mention Alvin Boyarsky, the legendary dean of the Architectural Association in London. He engaged Ron Herron, Peter Cook, Kaplický, Jiřičná, Dalibor Veselý, and Zaha Hadid at the AA.
Thanks to him, we were able to publish the book "Czech Functionalism" and present the exhibition of the same name at the AA. He had an extraordinary instinct for people. However, the AA is a private school.
Or Max Bächer in Darmstadt, who organized for years the so-called Darmstadt Wednesdays with lectures by world architects and brought the exhibition of "Brno Functionalists" to Darmstadt.
Professor Jan Hird Pokorný once told me: "I experienced 8 deans at Columbia University, and the best was the one who made the fewest changes." I often remembered that sentence. The dean must make changes; life and circumstances either force them or they must be undertaken to revive some part of the organism. However, they must do this almost like a surgeon - carefully and at the same time decisively - because they operate in an environment as fragile as porcelain and could cause more harm than good with clumsy movements. Wittgenstein's lesson applies here: every change that is not an improvement is a deterioration.

JK: What was the state of the faculty at that time?
VŠ: It looked like all schools in the republic. There was a complete lack of contact with the professional public and abroad, and there were no personalities of practicing architects.
However, from 1991-1997, this deficiency was soon made up by engaging architects from emigration (Šik, Šafer, Makarov, Zvěřina, Pitlach, Sedláček, but also Roubík, etc.) or even from local practice. However, it was not easy to withstand, because most of these newly appointed architects were employed on a half-time basis and needed to be vehemently defended in the internal groups of the school. That was not easy, and many could not even imagine it. Moreover, with the higher education law of 1990, architecture graduates lost the title Ing. arch. After huge efforts, I managed to achieve that the new law of 1997 returned this title to architects, and also succeeded in budgets where the teaching of architecture was assigned a higher coefficient by the ministry than other technical fields - 2.25. Those were two significant victories that greatly helped all architecture schools in the republic and still do so today.

JK: Do you feel, with some distance, that some things could have been done better or had to be undertaken earlier?
VŠ: It's hard to evaluate decisions later. You stand before decisions at a certain time; you can't postpone them and must resolve them somehow, even if you know that all the available solution alternatives are flawed. From them, you choose some optimum. But the worst thing would be to postpone decisions. I often returned to such problematic decisions in my thoughts, but I don’t seem to have made any serious mistakes. Superficial knowledge of the situation sometimes makes it easy to criticize things from a distance. But everyone makes small mistakes.

JK: What could be the criteria by which the level of individual architecture schools could be evaluated?
VŠ: The level of projects and diploma theses, the credibility of educators in the professional public, and the network of relationships with foreign schools. And probably, it should also be monitored how bad a diploma project can still pass. The same goes for doctoral theses, which should be published, as is the case in Western Europe. That would certainly reveal a lot.

JK: Who could ensure this comparison?
VŠ: For example, an international accreditation commission.

JK: Recently, doubts or considerations have emerged about the capacity of Czech higher education. Do you think that the Czech Republic should still be producing more architects each year? Is the increasing number of graduates related to their quality?
VŠ: This should be considered in light of the demographic curve, which does not look very optimistic for the future. In neighboring Germany, some schools are already closing, and all of them are worried about future students. Also, excessive mass production of architects cannot guarantee quality.

JK: You have visited a number of foreign architecture schools. Can certain national specifics be traced among them, or is the current world totally global?
VŠ: Architecture schools in the German area are different from those in France, which are different from those in Britain and Scandinavia. Schools in the Romance area (Italy, etc.) have too many students. Germany emphasizes the personality of the professor, which is also the case in Finland, where the relatively low number of students is beneficial. At TU Helsinki-Otaniemi, about 600 students study, which is a good standard. English schools are heavily artistically oriented. Abroad, there is no duality of architecture education at construction and architecture faculties as we have here. That is a blemish developed after the velvet revolution due to the fact that construction faculties discovered that something like the education of civil engineering actually does not exist in Western Europe.
Certain specificities not only exist but are being redefined and sought after now that students - due to the Bologna Declaration - will be able to move freely within the EU, to increase competitiveness and to enhance the attractiveness of offerings for students in different regions. This is currently being debated in Europe.

JK: What are the weaknesses or, conversely, strengths of the Prague FA in comparison with foreign competitors?
VŠ: The FA of ČVUT is certainly considered one of the best schools in former Eastern Europe abroad. This is also reflected in the large number of foreign students studying here through the ERASMUS exchange. The advantage, of course, is also the city of Prague, which is, as Zvi-Hecker likes to say, a great textbook of architecture itself. Compared to other faculties in the Czech lands and Slovakia, a larger number of practicing architects teach here. In the last three years alone, I managed to convince Ivan Kroupa, Hájek, and Šépka, and Ján Štempel to start teaching, and their entry has already borne fruit and changed the balance of power in the school. Ivan Kroupa will present his and his students' works at this year’s Biennale in Venice.
However, there are also many weaknesses. There is still a difficult dialogue between those who wish for a creative school (among them, besides myself, were Kroupa, Bočan, Koucký, and others) and those who prefer bureaucratic ideas about teaching and administration. The latter group also includes some who only began teaching after the velvet revolution, but in the meantime became ossified and are only interested in their self-interest. Not everything can be changed at once - what has been neglected for half a century - the library, spatial conditions, etc., and the behavior of people….

JK: Thank you for the interview.

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Prof. Ing. arch. Vladimír Šlapeta, DrSc.

1947 - born in Olomouc
1972 - graduated in architecture from ČVUT
1972-73 - architect in Ostrava
1973-91 head of the architecture department of the National Technical Museum in Prague
1986 - guest docent at TU Berlin
1987 - guest docent at TU Wien,
1987-91 - member of the executive committee of the International Confederation of Architectural Museums ICAM
1989-91 - General Secretary of ICAM
1988 - DAAD scholarship in the Federal Republic of Germany /2 months/
1990 - arrival at FA ČVUT, habilitation
1991 - Doctor of Technical Sciences
1991-97 - Dean of FA ČVUT
1992 - Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Architects AIA, Kunstpreis Berlin, appointed professor
1994 - Research Fellow at TU Delft /1 month/, elected member of the Academy of Arts Berlin
1994-2005 member of the jury for the Fritze Schumacher Award of the Toepfer Foundation at the University of Hanover
1995 - Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin /3 months/, elected member of the Learned Society of the Czech Republic
1995 - member of the joint UNESCO/UIA commission for architectural education
1997- Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects RIBA, honorary member of the Union of German Architects BDA
1997-2000 - Vice-Rector of ČVUT
2000 - Visiting Scholar of the Canadian Centre for Architecture CCA Montreal /4 months/
2001 - member of the joint UNESCO/UIA commission for evaluating architectural education
2002 - visiting professor at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Ljubljana
2003 - Dean of FA ČVUT

Publications
- PRAHA 1900-1978, guide to modern architecture. NTM Praha 1978
- Kamil Roškot 1886-1945, architectural work. GVU Olomouc 1978, Finnish edition 1979, German edition 1981
- Josef Kranz 1901-1968, architectural work. GVU Olomouc 1979
- Otakar Novotný 1880-1959, architectural work. GVU Olomouc and NTM Praha 1980
- Arnošt Wiesner 1890-1971, architectural work. GVU Olomouc 1981
- The Brno Functionalists. Helsinki 1983, German edition Innsbruck 1985
- Adolf Loos and Czech Architecture. Louny Gallery and NTM Prague 1984 /2nd edition 2000/
- Pavel Janák 1882-1956. Semperdepot Wien 1984 /with Olga Herbenová/
- Czech Functionalism 1918-1938. Architectural Association London 1987
- Baťa 1910-1950, architecture and urbanism. Exhibition catalog Zlín 1991
- Baustelle Tschechische Republik. Catalog of the Academy of Arts Berlin 1997, Polish edition 2002/
- Prague - XXth Century Architecture. Guide book /with Kohout and Temple/ Vienna 1997
- Baustelle Ungarn Is. A.Hrauským/Berlin 1998
- Baba 1932 - models and plans /with T. Šenberger and P. Urlich/ Prague 2000 /Polish edition 2002/
- F. L. Wright and Czech Architecture. Prague 2001
- Jan Kotěra 1872-1923, founder of modern Czech architecture /with others/ Prague 2002
- Lubomír Šlapeta 1908-1983, Čestmír Šlapeta 1908-1999, Scharoun's Czech Students
- Wrocław 2004 /English and Polish edition/
- Baustelle Slowenien Is A.Hrauským/Berlin 2004
- Jan Hird Pokorný - architectural work /with P. Kratochvíl/, Prague 2005

Awards
1992 - Kunstpreis Berlin, Forderungspreis Baukunst
1994 - Medal of the Minister of Education, Youth and Sports I.st..
1997 - Rector's Prize of ČVUT I. st.
1999 - Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic Award
2002 - Special Rector's Prize of ČVUT
2003 - Rector's Prize of ČVUT II. st.