Pavla Melková, Rostislav Švácha: Poetry - architecture

The VI PER Gallery warmly invites you on Thursday, March 8, 2018, at 19:00 to a discussion on the relationship between poetry and architecture and the presentation of a new collection of poems by Pavla Melková titled "Edges of the Day."

Why seek a relationship between architecture and poetry? And not slip into Joan Ockman's definition, where uninspired architectural culture simply "scans the intellectual scene to see what is new and what it might use"? For instance, when we seek how to return architecture to its humanist role, its human dimension. When we believe that poetics can free architecture and its perception from the confinement of mere functionality, technique, and instrumentality. Where we engage with architecture as a communicative space. When the foundation of communication is language. The language of architecture itself. And the language of perception and interpretation of architecture. Poetry as the language connecting a person with the surrounding world, a person with another person, a person with themselves. The ability to perceive, experience, understand the environment around us can be initiated, deepened, and cultivated. And the significance of poetry – as the language of speaking architecture and a way of interpreting the environment around us – may lie precisely in its potential to aid in increasing overall sensitivity.

We can observe the relationships between poetry and architecture in two main directions. The first is poetry as a property of architecture itself and the language of its communication with the user. The second – poetry as the language of perceiving architecture and its interpretation. And in a certain sense, poetry can be formative – at least in the realm of perception "shaping" the environment. For as Daniela Hodrová says: "There has always been a belief that with certain words and combinations of words, not only can we know reality, but we can also transform it."

Pavla Melková is an architect who also engages in artistic and theoretical activities. Since 1996, she has been a partner with Miroslav Cikán in the MCA atelier. She serves as the director of the Urban Detail Section at the Institute of Planning and Development of the City of Prague and teaches at the Faculty of Architecture at the Czech Technical University. She is the author of the books Bastion XXXI U Božích muk (2012), Experiencing Architecture (2013), A Table by the Window, a Book on the Table (2014), Space for Humans in the Works of Michal Škoda (2016), The Humanist Role of Architecture (2016), and the poetry collection Edges of the Day (2017); she also publishes in professional journals such as Golden Section, Architect, and Construction.

Rostislav Švácha is a historian and theorist of architecture, a university teacher, and a researcher at the Institute of Art History of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic in Prague. He is the author of many articles and studies and has published or edited books such as From Modernity to Functionalism: Transformations of Prague Architecture in the First Half of the 20th Century (1985, 2nd edition 1994), The Architecture of New Prague, 1895–1945 (1995), Karel Teige, 1900–1951: L’Enfant Terrible of the Czech Modernist Avant-Garde (1999, co-editor Eric Dluhosch), Angled, Square and Arched Shapes: Czech Cubist Architecture 1911–1923 (2000), Czech Architecture and Its Rigidity: Fifty Buildings 1989–2004 (2004), Sial (2010), Naprej! Czech Sports Architecture 1567–2012 (2012), StArt: Sport as a Symbol in Visual Art (2016), or the series of books Paneláci, published by UPM. Together with Marie Platovská, he is the editor of the volumes History of Czech Visual Arts V, 1939–1958 (2005) and History of Czech Visual Arts VI, 1958–2000 (2007).

Part of the discussion will be the presentation of the new poetry collection by Pavla Melková, Edges of the Day, published by Arbor Vitae in 2017. The book will be available for purchase at a discounted price during the evening.

Concept: Jiří Tourek

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