Students of architecture assist with the restoration of wooden churches

Brno - Students of the Faculty of Architecture of the Brno University of Technology (VUT) are participating in the rescue of wooden church buildings from the 17th and 18th centuries. They are creating a database that provides detailed descriptions of the architecture and technical condition of these monuments; this database can then serve as a basis for the restoration of often deteriorating churches. One church has already been successfully restored thanks to this initiative, reported ČTK project coordinator Helena Zemánková.
    "The wooden mountain church Prašivá in the Frýdek-Místek region is largely restored, and we would now like to help with the restoration of the church in nearby Albrechtice," Zemánková stated. Experts from VUT always assess how endangered the church is, check the wooden structure, verify whether it is affected by fungi, and propose a way to secure the building statically without jeopardizing its original artistic effect.
    About 50 students and their supervisors from the technical university are involved in the project, which started in November 2005 and will continue in the next semester. Last year, architects and conservationists from Italy, Slovakia, and Poland also collaborated on it - together they created, with the support of the European Union, a database of selected wooden sacral buildings in the former Eastern Bloc countries. According to Zemánková, these buildings often deteriorate, especially in Poland. "Next to them, there is often a larger, more modern church that serves the current religious community, and the wooden one, often listed as a UNESCO cultural heritage site, has no chance of survival beside it," the architect described to ČTK.
    She added that architecture students today mainly create new projects and urban planning solutions during their studies. "However, in this project, they get acquainted in detail with buildings older than three centuries, develop a relationship with them, and learn to manage the dialogue between the old and the new during their restoration," Zemánková noted.