Prague's Architecture Amidst Discipline and Disco
We tend to look down on the architectural heritage of the 1990s. After years of reconciling the attitudes of both experts and the general public towards post-war architecture, it’s now time to more thoroughly assess what was built in the post-communist era. On one hand, there was the austerity inspired by interwar modernism, functionalism, and the formally and conceptually “disciplined’ architecture of Alena Šrámková. On the other, the freely playful postmodernism of the idealized West.
We often associate the nineties with wild parties, relaxed conventions, and an optimistic atmosphere—and this was reflected in building projects as well. While the architectural community highlights this period's return to strict proportions, quality materials, and buildings with deliberate character, the wider public remembers mainly kitsch: conspicuous shapes, gilded frames, and exhibitions of wealth. Both perspectives, as well as their intertwining and, to a degree, their competition, create a fascinating picture of this decade.
The exhibition presents thirty selected buildings constructed in Prague between 1989 and 2004, placed along a timeline, and also tracks the circumstances of their creation: the evolving role of professional associations, the arrival of the first DIY superstores, and how political representatives spoke about architecture. The exhibition includes the opulent Olga chairs by Bořek Šípek, which he originally designed for the Office of the President of the Republic at Prague Castle as formal yet stackable armchairs for the Spanish Hall. Václav Havel once said of Šípek: "I slowly got used to Bořek's art, it took a long time, but then I got so used to it that I cannot be without it". The Dynamický Blok collective ironizes the aesthetics of the nineties, using memes—satirical images—to comment on the architecture from this contradictory era. An audiovisual loop from the Czech Television archive, together with a collection of photographs, places the observed period—from the Velvet Revolution to the Czech Republic's entry into the European Union—and its buildings into a broader social context. The exhibition, together with the book of the same name by Matěj Beránek, Jan Bureš, Radek Šrettr Úlehla, and Adéla Vaculíková, published by IPR Praha, creates space to approach the nineties without prejudice and sentiment.
