Vojtěch Lahoda: The Silence of Ladislav Lábus

The exhibition offered an overview of the work of one of our most remarkable contemporary creators. From the shopping center in Prague-Lužiny, realized in collaboration with Alena Šrámková and designed in the second half of the 1970s, we have the opportunity to observe an unusually logically consistent and, in its own way, "silent," but certainly noticeable development up to the most current projects: the reconstructions of Paličkova house in Baba and Edison transformer station. The metaphor of "silence" suggests itself when reading the text of one of Lábus's drawings, exhibited in Klatovy in 2000, which reportedly – as we learn from the catalog – was lost and where it read: "A house in which we do not feel the need to lie. A lie becomes a useless burden. A house of silence?" (1)

Speech Without Words
Is silence synonymous with sobriety, asceticism, taciturnity, or detachment? Sedláková sees the answer in the exhibition catalog like this: "Lábus's houses do not lie, and yet they are not houses of silence." On the other hand, she notes the "silent beauty" of Lábus's houses, buildings that "not only do not lie, but ... in which one cannot lie." These buildings supposedly "speak", "lead to speaking", yet in them "one can silence loudly." This leaves the reader – and potential user of the house – confused. Are these objects silent, or do they tell a story? And when they lead to talking, how is their silence achieved?
It seems that we have encountered a clash of a number of more or less metaphorical terms that, however, collide in oppositions. They may suggest that nothing is as simple as it seems at first glance. Lábus himself has somewhere confessed his admiration for the work of Louis I. Kahn. It was he who gave the famous lecture "Silence and Light" (2). Kahn understood the true essence of silence as "universal meaning", some essence of distilled, purified perfection that remains after the removal of all the layers of various, often incidental circumstances. That is why he was so fascinated by the Egyptian pyramids. Before them, we feel "true silence". We do not perceive the circumstances; they have been swept away by golden dust, but only "universal meaning."
Perhaps that kind of "silence," of course on a different scale and with the swept-away "golden dust" of circumstances, was what Lábus had in mind in the text of his drawing. In our case, those circumstances do not represent the toil of slaves, but perhaps bureaucratic barriers, discussions with clients, struggles with the site and its history, etc. All of this, in Kahn's words, will pass away. Silence will remain.
The concept of silence has become "sexy" not only in the art of architecture. The German band Einstürzende Neubauten, radically and deconstructively positioning themselves against "new buildings," released in their collection Strategies against architecture III from 1991-2001 a piece Silence is Sexy. After listening to their noisy compositions, one cannot be surprised that silence is "sexy, as sexy as death." It can also be part of the cultural context and tradition. Silence is a key metaphor for the characterization of Tadao Ando, to whose work Lábus's works are loosely associated (Platovská, p. 17).(3) The connection with the concept of "silence" is found especially in Finnish and Scandinavian works. A prompt for the analysis of "the culture of silence" through architecture was one strange remark by Bertolt Brecht: "The Finns are silent in two languages." He suggested the difficulty of linguistic, but also emotional communication among Finns, their dual world of "silence."(4)
As can be seen from the catalog, Lábus's work is not described simply. His creation directly invites contradictory conceptual polarities, such as narration - silence, austerity - richness, individualism - humility. Each concept has a relative Lábusian validity.

Structural Decor
Let us focus on the question of what approach the author takes to ornament and decor. The striking reconstruction of the Langhans Palace in Prague is eloquent in this regard.(5) The original historicizing house from 1870 received an Art Nouveau facade in the early years of the twentieth century. Lábus preserved it and highlighted it, inserting a new structure into it, and for the connection of both, he used his characteristic "structural decor": on the ground floor with horizontally fluted grooves on the facade, and on the roof with equally horizontal lines of green blinds. The spare clean approach to "ornament" is characteristic of Lábus. Every additional line, every break in the line warns the author as a threat of ornament's proliferation. And therefore, it must be treated strictly. One could even say that it is like beauty: neither is sought a priori, but both somehow naturally emerge from the structure of materials, spaces, and surfaces. The contemporary language of architecture appears very unobtrusive and "humble," in the same sense that Lábus himself urges architecture students. I would say that this humility - alongside intellectual and certainly artistic qualities, see for example excellent drawings — represents a great value in Lábus's approach. It is this that allows introspection, reflection, searching for genius loci and which may be a prerequisite for "the return of the metaphysical" (which is his desire) to architecture.
The exhibition presented not only the most important Lábus's projects, large photographs, and plans but also mostly sparingly simplified models made of brown cardboard. I was disappointed that only a few drawings with colored pencils were exhibited. They show completeness and a spark of the original vision that has not yet been subjected to analytical scrutiny.
The presented buildings accelerate perception and magnetize the viewer, drawing him into their seemingly purified, yet still felt mystery. They do not lose a human scale, as in the case of the Care Service House in Český Krumlov, whose southern facade seems to emerge from the additive principle of a rural house stacked upon itself, while the north turns towards geometrically designed glass loggias.(6) The villas in Vonoklasy, Roudnice nad Labem (7), or in Mukařov might not have been photographed in isolation but in the context of the landscape and place, perhaps panoramically, to make it clear how individually the creator approaches the concept of the house. In the first case, he "dissolves" it in the landscape; in the second, there might be a distant memory of Wright's house floating on the prairie, while in the third, the unusual gabled roof evokes the impression of some aberration, although it is a sensitive attempt not to protrude too radically from the surrounding buildings.
The exhibition clearly showed that Lábus designs a significant contemporary architecture, without his individualism and ego destroying the surroundings (or the inhabitants), as he is able to humbly, knowledgeably, and simultaneously creatively and confidently cope with the architecture of the past. What else does the art of construction in our space, rich in historical buildings, references, and memory, need?

Vojtěch Lahora - the author is an art historian, employee of the Art History Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, collaborator of the editorial office.

Notes:
1) Cf. Radomíra Sedláková, Buildings of Unobtrusive Beauty, in: Architect Ladislav Lábus. Prague 2004, p. 11.
2) Louis I. Kahn, Silence and Light. Prague 1999, pp. 54-74.
3/ Werner Blaser ed., Tadao Ando. Architecture of Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum, Basel 2001.
4) Not only Finnish, but also generally Scandinavian and Central European "culture of silence" is examined by Malcolm Quantrill - Bruce Webb eds., The Culture of Silence. Architect's Fifth Dimension, Studies in architecture and culture, No. 4, College Station. 1998
5) See A. No. 11/2002, 5/2003 - note of the editorial.
6) Vrz A. No. 16-17/1997, 12/1998 - note of the editorial.
7) See A. No. 5, 6/1999, 2, 5/2002 - note of the editorial.

Architect Ladislav Lábus
Organizer: Gallery Jaroslav Fragner
Curator: Radomíra Sedláková
Catalog texts: Marie Platovská, Radomíra Sedláková
Architect of the exhibition: Pavel Kolíbal
Gallery Jaroslav Fragner, 1.4. - 15.5.2004

Vojtěch Lahoda (1955-2019) was an art historian who specialized in the history of Czech modernism and avant-garde in a European context. From 1974-79, he studied art history and aesthetics at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University. Since 1980, he was an employee and later also the director of the Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences. In 1999, he earned his habilitation in the field of art history at Masaryk University in Brno. From 2000 until his death, he worked at the Institute for Art History at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University.