The exhibition of Contemporary Danish Architecture at Prague Castle will be enriched by a thematic Day of Danish Architecture and guided tours

The exhibition Contemporary Danish Architecture, which can be seen from September 23 to October 20, 2013 at the Jiřský Monastery of Prague Castle as part of Architecture Week, will be complemented by a series of guided tours and an excursion into the history of Danish architecture, which directly relates to Czech architecture:

Guided Tours by Rado Ištok - October 5 and October 10.
Rado Ištok's tour will focus on one project from each of the five categories of buildings that make up the exhibition. Participants will receive more detailed information about the author and interesting facts. Rado Ištok is a student of art history at Charles University in Prague. During his two-year study stay at the University of Copenhagen, he had the opportunity to see most of the exhibited projects firsthand; he learned about the others during his travels in Denmark. According to him, the relationship between society and its architecture is particularly crucial in Denmark. His guided tour will be based on this thesis, concluding with a space for questions and discussion.

Guided Tour by Ondřej Hojda – October 20.
Nowadays, the most common media for presenting architecture are photographs and images. As a result, we miss out on connections that are not immediately apparent. Ondřej Hojda's tour will allow listeners to place the exhibited panels within a broader context. It will focus on the foundations from which modern Danish architecture emerges, its social dimension, ecological aspect, and urban public space planning using Copenhagen as an example. Ondřej Hojda studied art history at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague and EHESS in Paris, and is currently completing his doctoral studies. He deals with the history of modern architecture from the mid-20th century to the present. He specializes in, among other things, Japan and Scandinavia, and in 2013 he completed a six-month research stay at the Arkitektur- og designhøgskole in Oslo.

Danish Architecture Day – October 17.
After the guided tour by Ondřej Hojda, you can look forward to a lecture by Zdeněk Lukeš titled Following the Footsteps of Theophilus von Hansen and Modern Danish Architecture in the Czech Republic at 6:30 PM, which will commemorate 200 years since the birth of this Danish architect, among others, a student of Karl Friedrich Schinkel. His work was significantly influenced by a trip to Greece in 1837, where he designed many Neoclassical buildings. From 1846, he worked in Vienna, where he participated in the construction of the so-called Ringstrasse, including its dominant feature – the Parliament building. As a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, he educated many Czech students, including Vratislav Pasovský, the designer of the Petřín Lookout Tower, Jan Koula, the author of the Čechův Bridge in Prague, and Václav Roštlapil, whose Strakova Academy currently houses our government and whose AVU building has produced generations of artists. Hansen was elevated to the nobility in 1884 by Emperor Franz Joseph I for his lifelong work. Zdeněk Lukeš's lecture will cover the life and work of this Danish architect and will focus on his architectural legacy in Moravia and Slovakia, namely three palaces in Brno and a church in Kežmarok. The impact of other significant Danish architects, such as the icon of Danish modernism Arne Jacobsen, on 20th-century Czech architecture will also be mentioned, connecting the seminar with the current exhibition at Prague Castle. Zdeněk Lukeš graduated from the Faculty of Architecture at the Czech Technical University, worked at the Archive of Architecture of the National Technical Museum from 1980 to 1990, and has been employed at the Office of the President of the Republic since 1990. He participated in the revitalization of the castle complex. From 2000 to 2003, he was the dean of the Faculty of Architecture at the Technical University in Liberec, and since 2004 he has been teaching at New York University in Prague. He is the author and co-author of many exhibitions, books, scholarly articles, and radio and television contributions, including for Respekt, Lidové noviny, Czech Radio, ČT, and BBC.

The lecture will take place in the New Gallery of Prague Castle, which will exceptionally open to the public for this occasion. Entrance will be from the II courtyard of Prague Castle.

Registration is required for all events at schneider@architectureweek.cz. Registered participants will have free admission to the exhibitions at Jiřský Monastery from 4 PM.