Lead Dušan 2011 - MgA. Svatopluk Sládeček (New Work)

I'm slowly forgetting the bile-filled atmosphere during the work of the jury. What caused it? Surely it was the large number of average and outright bad projects that we saw. Perhaps it was also the monotony and boredom that some otherwise well-executed works exuded, but it was definitely due to the composition of the jury. When looking into the catalogs from past years of the competition, the criticisms are actually still repeating, but the composition of the jury also repeats itself—mostly architects, often former graduates, and occasionally one theorist, architectural photographer, or someone similar. This is also the case in professional public competitions, so it's no wonder that architecture is spinning like proverbial crap under the weir and public interest in it is negligible.

What would an exhibition of works by teachers look like? And what would an exhibition of jurors' works look like? This is how students should be asking themselves if they want to improve their school.

However, what I really didn’t like during the viewing of student works had the same origin—in the lack of questions and answers as to why the solutions were proposed precisely as they are—from primitive, functional, and operational questions to interdisciplinary overlaps and inspirations. Why don't projects for literary galleries transcend the limits of ordinary construction? Why do luxury villa projects with studios look like they came out of a developer company's catalog? All this is often supported by graphics that are even tasteless or overly complex models. Architecture is not a fine art, but without developing its knowledge and skills, an architect is lost, and their work has nothing to rejuvenate itself from. But it’s not only fine art that architects can and must draw from.

Despite the aforementioned unpleasant feeling from viewing student works, which we partly fueled ourselves, images from interesting studios keep returning to my mind, which were just addressing overlaps in assignments and task processing. They are not only the awarded ones but also those that appeared in a broader selection or from which individual awarded works originate. I'm thinking of Jeníček, Koucký, Kohout, Jehlík, Sedlák, Krátký, and Aulík or Šépka. In them, I saw a number of overlaps from social, historical questions to artistic and conceptual ones. I'm actually surprised by the number of interesting studios at the school; I didn't expect it.

Personally, I would advise students that in the next years of the competition, they should form a more diverse jury and limit the number of practicing architects in it; they will learn more about architecture that way.