Helena Čapková: The Architecture of Antonín and Noémi Raymond

June 15 at 18:00 Helena Čapková: “The garden permeates into the house and the house crawls into the garden like a snake into the grass” - the architecture of Antonín and Noémi Raymond

Architects Antonín and Noémi Raymond were fascinated by Japan. Kladno native and student of the Prague Technical University Antonín Raymond (Reimann) met painter and graphic artist Noémi Parnessin during a voyage to the United States, where he fled driven by the ambition to become a world-renowned architect. The two artists formed an inseparable marital and creative couple whose work inspired numerous architects worldwide. The young Raymonds studied under the famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin in Arizona and traveled to Japan with him. In 1921, Raymond opened his own office there, which still operates in Tokyo today.
Helena Čapková's lecture will cover not only the individual projects of Antonín and Noémi Raymond but also their theoretical work on architecture, which addresses the relationship between traditional Japanese art and design and contemporary modernist creation. The sources for the lecture come from extensive research in the United States and Japan, so the audience will hear and see a wealth of yet unpublished material. The lecture will complement the popular television program Šumné stopy, which focused on the Raymonds and other Czech architects in Japan and which was broadcast by Czech Television in May of this year.

Helena Čapková is a Japanologist and art historian who studies the relationship between Japanese art and the art of the European avant-garde in the 1920s and 1930s. She has published several scholarly articles on this topic in English, Japanese, and Czech in the journals Stavba and Umění. As a consultant, she participated in the Czech Television program Šumné stopy and works externally at the Czech Radio station Vltava. In these months, she is completing a book about the architect Bedřich Feuerstein and his involvement in Japan with architect Antonín Raymond from 1926 to 1930.