The 15th edition of the nationwide Architecture Days festival will take place from Thursday, 2 October to Tuesday, 7 October, offering hundreds of events in more than 130 cities and municipalities across the Czech Republic and Slovakia. This year’s edition, subtitled ‘This Architecture’, highlights the contributions of extraordinary women in architecture – from 20th-century pioneers to contemporary architects, designers and activists.
In addition to the main theme, the festival will also focus on the work of Bohuslav Fuchs, who was born 130 years ago this year, as well as public spaces, the urban development of Brno, and landscape architecture. It will offer guided tours, visits to normally inaccessible buildings, walks, lectures, exhibitions and workshops for children.
The theme of this year’s Brno program focuses on the works of female architects, landscape architects and public figures who have changed and are changing the appearance of cities. One of the walks will take visitors in the footsteps of Eliška Machová, a significant pioneer of women’s education at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Architect Eva Eichlerová will present the sensitive and rapid transformation of the former monastery of the Voršilkas on the corner of Josefská and Orlí into temporary shelter housing.
In Zábrdovice and Husovice, visitors will learn about social housing projects from the interwar era and their impact on everyday life and the changing position of women in the city. One of the lectures in the program will focus on contemporary landscape architects, followed by a debate on the role of women in the architectural profession. A tribute to one of the leading figures of architecture, Růžena Žertová, will come in the form of a theatre production, ‘The Price of Care’, performed at the BUT Faculty of Architecture.
Another thematic strand of the program will be a retrospective of the work of Bohuslav Fuchs, an architect who fundamentally influenced the appearance of interwar and post-war Brno. A guided tour of the Palace of the Noblewomen (‘Palác šlechtičen’) will introduce his sensitive post-war reconstruction of the Baroque residence to house an ethnographic museum. Tours will also visit the ‘Brno Alps’ building and other of Fuchs’s interwar projects in Masarykova čtvrť. The unusual audiowalk format will introduce the current state of Zábrdovice Spa and its architectural significance. One of the festival routes will also lead to the Jabloňová housing estate, which was created from the late 1960s according to the design of Bohuslav Fuchs and his son Kamil.
Other themes of this year’s edition will include the transformation of public space, the urban development of Brno, and its neglected places. Urban planner Jana Kaštánková will offer a critical view of the development of the urban structure in the field. Special attention will be paid to gender-sensitive city planning. The chief architect of the BVV area, Lenka Štěpánková, will present the planned changes to the Brno Exhibition Centre and individual pavilions.
Another of the walks will focus on current urban projects in the city centre. An exhibition dedicated to the visions of the new underground railway and its stops, which could fundamentally influence the shape of Brno’s infrastructure, will also provide a glimpse into the future of the city.
Other tours include the open spaces of the revitalised Svratka River embankment, the post-industrial coexistence of city and nature in the Planýrka area, and the transformation of a city garden into a playground at Kraví hora. The history of the city will be brought closer with a tour around the interwar projects of civil engineer Jaroslav Josef Polívka in Zábrdovice and the area around Hoppova. Other walks will be dedicated to the commercial portals in the center of Brno designed by architect Zoltán Egri, or the Lesná housing estate, which, even after 60 years, retains its exceptional character connecting modern housing construction and nature.
The program will also include visits to normally inaccessible buildings or places, such as the studio and robotics workshop at the Faculty of Architecture of BUT, or the backstage of the Radost Theater, accompanied by a workshop for children.
The main Architecture Days program will be followed by the sister festival Film and Architecture from 1-6 October, which will celebrate architecture, art, and film personalities who have been unfairly left in obscurity – whether because of gender, time, or collective memory. The Brno Festival will open with ‘Vtáčnik’ at Kino Scala, with the participation of director Eva Križková. Other screenings will take place at the Villa Tugendhat and the BUT Faculty of Architecture. The organizer of both festivals is the Kruh association.
The complete festival program will be published in the second half of August on the festival website. Most events are free as usual, but some may require prior registration, which will open on 14 September, and some parts of the accompanying program may be subject to a fee.
