Doc. PhDr. Marie Benešová has passed away

In 1950, she completed her studies in art history and aesthetics at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University in Prague, and in the same year, she joined the Department of Art History and Architecture at the Faculty of Architecture and Civil Engineering at Czech Technical University in Prague. She never left the school; only during the reorganization of Czech Technical University in the 1960s did she move to the Faculty of Civil Engineering at Czech Technical University, then in the 1970s to the Faculty of Architecture at Czech Technical University, until in the 1990s, she transitioned to the newly formed independent Department of Architecture at the Faculty of Civil Engineering, Czech Technical University. For more than half a century, she thus educated future architects in the fields of art history and architecture history, always doing so in a way that was unforgettable not only for its high professionalism but also for its liveliness and charm. With the understanding that history is best studied directly on specific buildings, she tirelessly prepared demanding excursions for students not only around Europe.

In addition to teaching, she dedicated herself to architecture in many other areas. She worked very actively in a number of committees of the former Union of Architects. Her primary interest was in heritage preservation, where she focused particularly on the period since 1800. Equally significantly, she was active in publicist work, addressing current architecture, among other things, as a member, and in the 1980s as the chairwoman, of the editorial board of the journal Architecture of Czechoslovakia.

She wrote the first monographs on Josef Gočár and Pavel Janák, books dedicated to the architectural development of her beloved Mariánské and Františkovy Lázně, and she produced the first comprehensive work clearly characterized by the title Czech Architecture in the Transformations of Two Centuries. She contributed to the preparation of a number of other publications and numerous exhibitions.

In Marie Benešová, Czech Technical University, but above all, Czech architecture loses one of the unique personalities that significantly, albeit perhaps not overtly, influenced the thinking of the majority of architects throughout the second half of the century.