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In memoriam: Dalibor Veselý.

Helen Mallinson. London Metropolitan University.

‘In every culture a series of things is taken for him but planted its ideas afresh. What he saw granted and lies fully beyond the explicit very clearly was that cultural repression was consciousness of anyone, and even in the not just the distinguishing feature of dodgy greatest dissolution of traditional forms, mores dictators or the Soviet communist regime, it and customs, the degree to which things held lay at the very heart of the modernity itself. Its in common still determine everyone, but is only characteristic projects, whether construed as more concealed.’ - Hans-Georg Gadamer repressive or emancipatory, rationalist or utopian, were essentially anti-culture and anti- In 2006 the RIBA honoured Dalibor Veselý urban. For Dalibor the whole point of Western with the Annie Spink Award for Excellence in freedom lay in its freedom to practice its Architectural Education. Dalibor had just culture. So the question he raised again and retired after seventeen years of teaching at again, was what exactly constituted culture and Cambridge and ten years teaching at the AA, how could its practice be continued? Dalibor over which time his ideas had become well believed that architects, amongst others, had known, even outside the small circle of places lost the plot (some two or so centuries before) he frequented; the idea, for example, that you and become quite incapable of recognising the could develop a fragment of city collectively relationship between culture and architecture around a series of institutions, or use or the deep culture of architecture itself. architectural drawings to develop a cultural Needless to say he imagined culture as setting, or phenomenology as a rationale, or something more than coffee shops, retail see architecture as part of the framework of the therapy and ubiquitous public space. everyday, or embodiment of its deepest meanings. Ideas take fire, even when the main My experience of Dalibor’s teaching serves as mode of communication is old-fashioned face- one instance of the impact his thinking has to-face dialogue. Dalibor’s printed output is a had. When I began studying architecture at shadow of the real thing and the real thing is, Newcastle University in 1972 there were many as he might argue, the city. Dalibor devoted his wonderful things to discover about the place life to the education of architects. but the curriculum of the architecture school was not one of them. I don’t know how we , Dalibor’s home city, is now one of the collectively knew something was wrong but most visited. In 1968, when he fled to London, we absolutely did and proved restless students it was hidden behind the Iron Curtain that in consequence. It was not a bad education per came down on the Prague Spring. Like many se. Projects started small and simple in first exiles Dalibor brought his home culture with year and got bigger as you went up the school Charrette 2(1) Autumn 2015 129 ISSN: 2054-6718 finishing with something like a thesis project had just signed up to the EU; that was merely a on an airport. Briefs were always highly trade agreement. You had to go to to find specific about function and space a coffee shop. requirements. You got to design an office, a school and a bit of housing; a yacht club I encountered Dalibor, Europe, the Eastern encouraged architectural expression and an Bloc, and the idea of the city, by signing up for artist’s studio stood in for landscape. Design a place on the Essex postgraduate programme progressed in an orderly fashion through site that he taught with . Rather sketches and a photograph or two, to plans, to than attend the PCL history lessons you could sections, to elevations, to details, to the final spend Thursdays at the Royal Academy. Here perspective. In building science they told us Joseph presided over the history seminar in the about all the dreadful mistakes that modern morning; it moved at a shocking speed. We architects were prone to make so you thought spent weeks studying a paragraph or two by about structure and services as you went. We Vitruvius, then Alberti, and so it went on. designed using grids. In history we submitted a Dalibor directed the theory seminar in the weekly sheet of tracings from books to afternoon. It comprised a philosophical pursuit illustrate Classical, Gothic, Renaissance and of the origins of modernity and the threat it Mannerist buildings by well-known architects. posed to European culture, working backwards We competed with each other over colouring from Merleau Ponty through Heidegger and techniques, types of print paper, and Husserl, to Descartes. It was chronologically presentation drawings. Forty years later this the opposite but set at about the same pace as educational process is still recognisable but Joseph’s class. The experience was at once even the most conservative of RIBA visiting terrifying – it induced a constant feeling of boards might expect students to figure out painful ignorance – and completely issues of culture and context, or grapple with exhilarating. Strangely, study in depth things like programme. Ensconced within the provoked extraordinary extent. Between them hessian-lined walls of the architecture Dalibor and Joseph opened a floodgate of department, we learned nothing of Newcastle books, buildings, cities, countries, architecture, the city or how architecture partook of its art, which quickly expanded into an alarming urban domain. wealth of ideas that seems to have grown rather than diminished over the years. The hard As students we did not really know what to do part was trying to make sense of what it all with our revolutionary conviction that things meant, particularly in terms of design. ought to change. The year out became the moment of revelation as we drifted south to the Dalibor’s Unit 1 at the AA was conspicuously AA and PCL (Polytechnic of Central London – different to anything anyone else was doing as Westminster was known then). Here we and, at least for some of us, led the way. encountered a plethora of competing teachers Working with Mohsen Mostafavi, his then and prophets in full swing. Roughly speaking studio assistant, now Dean of the Harvard they divided into three main parties. One Graduate School of Design, Dalibor produced collected around issues of social inequality. a new programme for architecture, best There were some notable feminist architects represented in the final catalogue of their and social activists in my Newcastle cohort. studio projects, Architecture and Continuity: Another attracted the more scientifically Kentish Town Projects 1978-81. Dalibor’s minded who saw the potential for combination of design vision, intellectual and technological innovation in architecture. We moral authority was such that in 1978 he was had been avid readers of the Whole Earth invited to move to the Cambridge Department Catalogue. The third group gathered around of Architecture, as was Joseph, where they the arts. Amongst the broad spectrum of established a new Graduate Programme in the thinkers and practitioners to be found here, History and Philosophy of Architecture. In Dalibor Veselý had already emerged as a Cambridge Dalibor mounted a critical charismatic figurehead. He was utterly challenge to the scientifically oriented status scathing of any approach to architecture that quo, running and propagating a succession of did take on board the significance of European design studios with tutors that included Eric culture. I for one had no idea of what this Parry, Phil Meadowcroft, Carolyn Steel, David meant. Indeed at this point no one really saw Dernie, and, from the beginning, Peter Carl. London as a European city even though we Peter also co-taught the Graduate programme Charrette 2(1) Autumn 2015 130 ISSN: 2054-6718 with Dalibor following the departure of Joseph André Breton and his circle – developing an to the University of Pennsylvannia. The Essex insight that culminated in his involvement in course, meanwhile, had already launched a an exhibition at the Hayward and guest editing bevy of academics that including Robin Evans, the seminal Surrealism and Architecture AD in Alberto Pérez-Gómes and David 1978. Leatherbarrow. For students of Dalibor a version of his words Imagine how exotic a Czech dissident seemed in written form was something of a treat. back then. He exuded intellectual authority as Words mostly passed from mouth to mouth, well as a quick wit and copious amounts of conversation to conversation. Dalibor stood cigarette smoke. In fact Dalibor’s European quite determinedly within a lineage of teachers credentials were impeccable. He had studied that stretched back to the ancient Greeks and engineering, architecture and art and finished a the art of discourse. Cigarette in hand, alive to PhD at in Prague on the the situation, the ensemble of arguments, the Baroque-Gothic architecture of Santini-Aichel. joke, the ironies, the politics and pathos, the His father was a noted painter, his brother depth. Dalibor would stir the surface of a Drahosh a physicist, and Dalibor an difficult discussion and let fall a summary accomplished violinist as well as an architect phrase or two that would illuminate the who worked for Josef Havlicek and Karel problem. It seemed momentary, like a flash of Honzik. He knew in person some of the most lightning in a cave. The problem was never distinguished and interesting intellectuals, technical: the meaning of techne, on the other artists, filmmakers and poets of the day. As hand, demanded careful attention. You could Dalibor’s long term colleague and close friend begin to understand through drawing, or by recounts, whilst in learning to think historically and Prague Dalibor had attended the seminars of philosophically, sometimes both. The real task, Czech philosopher Jan Patočka.1 Patočka was however, lay in design. As Dalibor said: an opponent of the incumbent Soviet regime: he argued that political freedom should be 'It is only in design that we can come close to attended by personal responsibility and the essential reality of architecture using not promoted an orientation toward the good, only analytical skills, but also the practical beliefs that earned him years of censorship and of skills, visual intelligence and the an untimely death. Patočka was the student of deep experience of practical situations.'2 , another Czech and founder of the phenomenological tradition, as well as Despite his thorough philosophical and cultural Henri Bergson and . grounding Dalibor did not arrive in London in Patočka’s seminars attracted intellectuals from 1968 as a teacher of architecture with ready- across the practicing arts as well as made answers. They were developed in their philosophy, including Václav Havel the future first form during his ten years at the AA and president. Patočka, following Husserl, had Essex and refined during his long sojourn at developed a particular mode of enquiry that Cambridge where, for a while, he managed to examined the taken for granted or seemingly oversee a synergy between the design studios obvious; qualities, which as Hans-Georg and the history and theory programme. His Gadamer suggests in our opening quote, are teaching practice started life in the hothouse tenacious but routinely overlooked. Indeed marketplace atmosphere of the AA under Gadamer’s practice of philosophical Alvin Boyarsky’s rule. The AA back then became central to Dalibor’s constituted a spectacular antithesis to the approach and Gadamer himself became a architectural education prescribed by the 1958 friend and a correspondent. In Dalibor Oxford Conference on Architectural studied with the art historians Hans Sedlmayr Education; the model Newcastle University and Hermann Bauer and the humanist Ernesto was so diligently following. The conference Grassi, one of Martin Heidegger’s students. In had produced an ‘Official System’ and called Paris in 1968 Dalibor met the Situationist for the standardisation of architectural Group and conjured the term ‘Continualists’ education and its integration into the university for his group. He was already familiar with system with the aim of raising the profile of Czech cubism and had developed a keen the profession. The AA, in dire financial straits interest in the Surrealists – his father was a at the time, was groomed for an arranged member of the Czech group and in touch with marriage with the Imperial College of Science Charrette 2(1) Autumn 2015 131 ISSN: 2054-6718 and Technology. Negotiations broke down in architecture library, built up by Robin 1971, however, as Imperial recoiled from the Middleton, and the school had sponsored some staff and student protests against the threatened interesting staff and students, including Colin loss of freedom and independence that were Rowe, Cedric Price and Peter Eisenman, the AA’s heritage. Though virtually penniless Anthony Vidler, Nicholas Bullock and Dean the school community refused to allow the Hawkes. The arrival of Dalibor, together with school to close and elected Alvin Boyarsky as Joseph Rykwert and Peter Carl, all prompted its Chairman. By the end of the decade Alvin by Robin Middleton’s recommendation, had transformed the school and had elaborated instigated a new era. As Andrew Saint explains the now widely copied unit or studio system. it, ‘the Diploma studios became favoured as a vehicle for speculation’. Whilst this did not go Alvin’s methods were brutal. Tutors on short down particularly well with those who contracts had to ‘sell’ their units to students believed in teaching from scientific principles whilst students had to convince tutors to take or learning from the knee of the modernist them on. Alvin had no interest in setting a office, a crisis only emerged when Research standard curriculum, instead he gave tutors the Assessment Exercises really kicked in 2001. freedom to set their own agendas. The AA All forms of intensive studio teaching, quickly became a centre of architectural particularly at diploma level and certainly by innovation, debate and talent. Dalibor, as Alvin established staff, were judged unproductive. It recognised, was a perfect candidate for this was, as Dalibor might have seen it, the new agonistic and world-oriented scheme; he beginning of the end of the Cambridge Spring. acknowledged Dalibor as the most influential Dalibor retired from Cambridge in 2005 but thinker in London. Dalibor certainly kept his interest going, teaching more appreciated the freedom Alvin offered and, occasionally at the University of Pennsylvania somewhat ironically, immediately became the and an Honorary Professorial Fellow Unit that fought for shared culture, just at the at the Manchester School of Architecture. He moment when celebrity architecture was in the was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the making. His unit’s approach to the design of University of Lincoln in 2009. huge urban blocks as a collective endeavour was highly polemical. It represented a way of Dalibor attracted a devoted and loyal team of working with the fragmentation of modern collaborators and became an inspiration to culture and fostered an allusive style of many. As a person he could be as warm, drawing, one quite different to the generous and entertaining as he was fiercely conventional rendering of objects in space. critical. It was hard to ignore his passionate Unit One drawings were constructed like conviction that architecture really mattered, or multi-dimensional fragments of city, spatially that architectural culture had depth. Many of and programmatically hierarchical but Dalibor’s students have gone on to become indeterminate. Dalibor had no time at all for influential practitioners, academics and formulas or concepts or the instrumental educationalists. Schools of architecture all over thinking that attended geometrically or the world have an ex student or two tucked technologically driven solutions. Clarity came into their programme, by now several instead from developing a deep understanding generations down the line. Whilst it is easy to of the ‘typical human situations’ that he argued miss the finer points of Dalibor’s philosophy ordered our world and gave meaning to our and but skim the surface of what he meant by place within it. European culture, it is harder to avoid the big questions he raised in architectural education In moving to Cambridge Dalibor moved to the and, more generally, about architecture’s epicentre of Oxford Conference territory contribution to how architecture and urban following the arrival of Leslie Martin in 1956, order provide the conditions for culture. For one of the key instigators of the conference. Dalibor the topic was always part of a The Martin Centre consolidated the Cambridge conversation, one that ran continuously school’s scientifically oriented research ethos through a circle of friends that included in 1974 and most of the teachers were also Kenneth Frampton, Alan Colquhoun, Robert practicing architects; several of them, like Maxwell, Robin Middleton, Homa Fardjadi, Colin St John Wilson, the school’s professor , Mohsen Mostafavi, Werner and head from 1975 to 1989, were very Oechslin, Irena Murray, Jiri Horsky, Hana eminent. There was an excellent art and Hlavackova, David Leatherbarrow and Peter Charrette 2(1) Autumn 2015 132 ISSN: 2054-6718 Carl. He also maintained conversations about culture in many other disciplines.

To frame a wider discourse Dalibor did produce one substantial book, Architecture in an Age of Divided Representation, published in 2004. It is the culmination of some thirty years of work and stands as a pretty good testament to his main lines of thought. He was delighted when it gained him the Bruno Zevi Book Award granted by the International Committee of Architectural Critics. There is also a sprinkling of published articles and chapters in books, including one in the recently published Phenomenologies of the City, edited by Henriette Stener and Maximilian Sternberg. Before he died Dalibor working on a book provisionally titled The Modernity of the Baroque, the period when communication between disciplines around common profound questions seems more evident than in the current climate of specialist knowledge and expertise. He has left a daunting task for future scholars to complete but more importantly, in the lives he touched, he was a source of fiery inspiration. As Peter Carl explains, he inspired the building of an ethos:

The intensity, depth and acuteness of insights, not to mention the originality of the designs, he brought to the subject had the effect of creating an ethos, what might be termed an architectural culture. People learned that architecture was very profound and rich, and that it possessed its own integrity, not to be derived from the sciences, psychology, art history, etc. At the same time, this ethos was pervaded by optimism and generosity, a belief that the city - and its culture - could not be flattened to the aggregate of individuals pursuing self-interest, but possessed the capacity to become the framework for depth of understanding first articulated by Aristotle.

Dalibor Veselý, scholar of architecture, born 19 June 1934; died 31 March 2015.

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REFERENCES

1 For the source of what follows see David Leatherbarrow (2015). : (1934– 2015). Architectural Research Quarterly, 19, pp 9-12.

2 Dalibor Vesely, ‘In Defense of Architecture’, Compendium: the Work of the Department of Architecture, catalogue accompanying the exhibition at the RIBA, 2006.

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