Prague-based design and architecture curator as well as editor Adam Štěch presents a lecture on the many years of his adventures in architecture all around the world. Since 2006 he has been travelling in Europe, USA, Latin America and Japan to discover and visit hidden gems of modernist architecture from the period between 1920 and 1980. His interest is driven by passion for rediscovering forgotten or lesser known architectural treasures and documenting them in the actual conditions. The lecture is part of the series “Interventions in Architecture”.

Next to public buildings of all typologies and purposes, the private residences are the most fascinating architectural spaces with the mark of their inhabitants and a personal atmosphere of intimacy. Visiting these private interiors, very often never before published, is the most challenging part of Štěch‘s hunting for architecture, as he called his creative passion. 

The 20th century presents 100 years of high-speed turbulence in all aspects of modern lifestyle. It brought a completely new perspective on the way how we behave in our society. Two of the main catalysts of the ever changing society were also architecture and design, which devised completely new aesthetic and vision of our living habits.

Architects and designers were some of the most important game changers, making radical statements about how our lifestyle should adapt to the new 20th century. Architecture and design, standing next to each other, were two of the main guns to kill old-fashioned and bourgeois taste and to celebrate new forms, reflecting the new century. Interior residential design, which was then an essential part of the architectural profession, became the model for new experiments, where architects tested their new ideas in reality. Man and family became a perfect entity to experiment with and the architecture of family dwellings was crucial in developing new forms and functions.

Adam Štěch will show these turbulent changes in interior design and avant-garde utopian concepts of living through the selection of residential interiors he visited and photographed himself. He will also talk about his recently published book „Inside Utopia: Visionary Interiors and Futuristic Homes”, he co-created for Berlin-based Gestalten publishing house.    

Adam Štěch (born in 1986 in Děčín) has been engaged in design, architecture and fashion as an art theoretician, writer and curator for a long time. He graduated with a master's degree of art history at Charles University in Prague. Since 2009 he works as an editor of the Prague-based magazine Dolce Vita and as a co-founder of the creative collective OKOLO he prepared dozens of publication and exhibition projects in the Czech Republic and abroad. He is also the author of numerous texts on design and architecture for local and international media. His articles were published in international magazines such as Wallpaper, Modernism, Damn, Cool Hunting, Domus, Architonic, Mark, Frame, Form, A10 or SightUnseen. He has collaborated with brands and institutions such as Phillips de Pury, Casa Mollino, Gubi, Designblok, Tolix, Verreum, Form, Design Museum Holon, Depot Basel, Bratislava Design Week, Vienna Design Week, Ziba, Dox, Qubus, Maharam, and more. Since 2013 he teaches history of design at the Prague-based Scholastika. Adam Štěch was also a member of the curatorial team of the 25th Biennale of Graphic Brno 2012 and an external member of a jury at the Academy of Arts and Design in Prague for several times. Additionally he has his own design show at Czech Radio 1.

The aim of the series “Interventions in Architecture” is to make the audience in Berlin acquainted with interesting architectural ensembles, discussions about reconstructions, revitalisations and other invasions in the architectural as well as urban and public space in the Czech Republic. Many Czech towns and places experienced a long historic development, which is reflected in their architectural tradition. Contrary to German towns and cities, especially Berlin, they were not destroyed during the war and so every change today is an intervention in an ensemble, which is several centuries old. The events of the series present a selection of architectural interventions from different places in the Czech Republic as well as from different historical, political and social eras.

The lecture by Adam Štěch will be in English.

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Zeit & Ort

27.06.2017  |  19:00 

Tschechisches Zentrum Berlin
Wilhelmstraße 44 / Eingang Mohrenstraße
10117 Berlin

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