1968 — Dana Zámečníková (* 1945, Prague)

What societal theme do you remember from the year of your graduation?
—— I would say that it wasn't just the year 68, but even before that, the time was rapidly leaning towards overall relaxation and change. Already in the summer of 67, we could go on an internship organized through a student organization, which was actually established by architecture student Franta Sedláček; although he probably wasn’t alone in this, I don’t remember who else was involved. I worked in Germany, and then we met with classmates in Paris and went to see the buildings of Le Corbusier and contemporary architecture in France and Italy. It was amazing. We could travel the world!
In the spring of 68, amidst the clear atmosphere of the Prague Spring, which is hard to describe for anyone who didn’t experience it, I was completing my last credits, exams, and diploma thesis with architect Cubra and studio head architect Jiří Šturda. I defended my diploma to become – an architect engineer; that’s how it’s officially recorded, so I might be the only architect engineer in the world, and it seems that way; maybe it was a foreboding. I still have doubts about the status of women in world-class architecture, how many really succeeded on their own, not as partners. It seems that it can still be counted on the fingers of one hand.
Right after graduation, I went again with Jiří Suchomel on a work internship at the department of architecture of professor Gottfried Bohm in Aachen.
So in August during the occupation, I was not in Prague, but instead, I was desperately sitting in Aachen by the radio and the phone. If I remember correctly, the connection was complicated, and during our first phone call with my parents, we spent the whole five minutes crying without saying a word. I will never forget that experience. We were hungry for new opportunities at that time. Perhaps it’s true that when you can’t have something, you want it even more, and you fight harder for it.
It was a time when we thought we were young, smart, and amazing, and that everything would be even more amazing, that everything was waiting for us, just waiting to grab it by the horns.
But soon everything was, of course, different.

Do you remember which architectural question you considered important at that time, or what question your thesis posed?
—— Our school of architecture was still in the old building in Zikovka, where the ČVUT rectorate is today, actually in the oldest building, so the spirit of past centuries was just blowing through there, but maybe that very contrast provoked us to try our best to gain an overview of what was happening in contemporary world architecture; it was not easy at all. Not only was there no internet, where one could just click and everything would look beautiful, but obtaining any magazine or book was extremely difficult, and getting information about novelties, for example about the group of architects from Archigram, about architect Buckminster Fuller, Yona Friedman, and many others, was like winning the lottery.
For my diploma, I made a theater for Most, so I was mainly interested in structures, because my conception of theater was in line with the trends of that time. As simple, clean, and variable as possible, stage, auditorium, everything movable and retractable, sliding from the ceiling and from the floor so that it could be a proscenium as well as an open space where people sit on the floor and actors move among the audience. A dynamic grid. This was certainly connected to the period of relaxation we were experiencing, with the time of the Prague Spring when many new small theaters and avant-garde performances emerged, a new wave of Czech films. There were so many new cultural impulses that it was impossible to keep up with them. I was always interested in everything, more than is healthy because then one doesn’t know anything properly, but there’s nothing to be done about that; I have it set up that way…
The opponent of my diploma thesis was architect Karel Prager, and it was a pleasant shock for me when he invited me to work in his studio after I graduated. Perhaps it was due to the structures; who knows, I didn’t feel particularly amazing. But I had completely different plans. Since I finished architecture at the age of 23, it seemed to me that I still deserved to go to school, and because many of my classmates, like Jiří Suchomel, Dalibor Vokáč, Emil Přikryl, or Václav Králíček, continued their studies at AVU, I transferred to VŠUP into the special studio of professor Josef Svoboda and at the same time I worked for about two years at the recently founded Sial. And there, discussions about architecture, comparisons, and evaluations – often very harsh evaluations – never ceased. From morning till night, at breakfast and dinner, at the water coolers and on the slopes.

Did any of your teachers significantly influence your view of the field?
—— Although, for example, professor Cubra was undoubtedly a great personality and certainly important for me, and Dr. Benešová, whom I knew from Hřebenky where she lived, the relationship between students and professors at ČVUT was somewhat different than what I had the opportunity to experience at VŠUP. Prof. Josef Svoboda, a world-class scenographer, had only a few students, whom he knew personally and had enough time for each of them, provided we managed to come to school between 8 and 11 in the morning because afterward, he would leave for the theater. Thus, he defined a schedule for us and showed a firm personal work routine. It was definitely an enormous inspiration that we could observe his work, his continuous flow of ideas, which mostly, of course, had nothing to do with scenography… Once he was talking about a laser that he worked with for the Magic Flute in Munich, then he told how he charges dispersed water droplets on stage, which are either plus or minus, to create a curtain of fog that disappears when needed. He thought of making a mirror from foil as a vacuum, so the image changes as needed; in Faust, he solved the problem of keeping a silk or what kind of spiral to hang straight before it burns at the end... He simply showed us that one should never give up and that his enthusiasm for work is infinite. Or when he created space actually only with light, working with light permeability, with light illusion, as he once advised me: Try to catch light, try to understand it and give it a program! I probably didn’t succeed in that in my diploma work in January 1973, but it did lead to the realization of Molière's Amphitryon at the National Theater with director Miroslav Macháček and actor Josef Kemr, who brought me a bouquet at the premiere… I really don’t know what all is true or not true about Svoboda, but as an artist, he was genius and timeless. Every new production carried a new excellent idea; he never did anything the same way, even though he could easily just draw from experience... It happened that I met students in America who stared at me when they found out that I could see Svoboda at school every day, as they traveled 400 km to one of his lectures. That’s the impulse that not only a professor but anyone one meets can impart to their students: the obsession with work, dissatisfaction with results, because it doesn’t matter how far new technologies advance and how revolutionary they are. What matters is the engagement. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s about fine arts, scenography, glass, architecture, or another creative activity.
It was the same in Liberec at Sial with Karel Hubáček and Míra Masák, the same trust towards beginning architects, the same engagement that they could pass on, both of them were amazing in the firmness of their positions, and therefore they probably raised an entire new generation, like John Eisler and today’s professors like Emil Přikryl, Martin Rajniš, Jiří Suchomel, and Zdeněk Zavřel.
By the way, despite various work in architecture and scenography, my greatest work has been with glass, whether it was projects in architecture, such as the Mercedes building in Prague, or exhibitions and workshops around the world. It certainly gives me pleasure that aside from representation in various museums, my work is also exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum in New York… Now I am again interested in Plexiglass. So I hope that some marks of my studies have been left on me.

If you consider the "future" school of architecture, what characteristic should it carry over from the school you attended?
—— Besides the necessity to learn basic technical expertise – which holds true in any field – it’s about inspiration from personalities! To have the luck to meet them and understand what is important. But this has been true for centuries; it’s always the same. And I think it is a great truth what Svoboda wrote to me as a dedication in his monograph: "Not only does the teacher influence his students, but the students influence their teachers as well."