Earlier this year I participated together with two other friends in a 24-hour competition called SUPERSTUDIO, which originally comes from Australia. You get a various assignment, that is only limited to built environment, and you have exactly 24 hours to develop your idea and afterwards present it to the competition jury. A theme was chosen in one northern Czech city well-known for its former textile industry. We were supposed to deal with the street connecting a train station with an old city centre. Each citizen of the city knows this street and probably pass it at least one a month, but that is all. No social magnet could be found on that street. The stay is reduced to a minimum just to get between the places. Our task was to change it.
From the beginning we knew that only an architectural intervention would not work here so we try to engage in the perception of this street. Each city has its monuments portrayed on postcards, advertisements, in guidebooks, etc. and these buildings can help to create an identity of the city to the outside. We decided to use this principle for creating a new identity for that street, but for the local citizens. A series of postcards would be made and distributed to each mailbox. It is just an initiative step that precedes a real change, but most importantly perception of the whole street would change. Pedestrians could discover, what they are passing by each morning and identify with this quite anonymous space. It is not problem of this particular street. A lot of Czech cities have problems with attracting people to the public space. People are simply not get used to spent their time in that type of spaces after more than 40 years of communist era, but this is another story.
From the beginning we knew that only an architectural intervention would not work here so we try to engage in the perception of this street. Each city has its monuments portrayed on postcards, advertisements, in guidebooks, etc. and these buildings can help to create an identity of the city to the outside. We decided to use this principle for creating a new identity for that street, but for the local citizens. A series of postcards would be made and distributed to each mailbox. It is just an initiative step that precedes a real change, but most importantly perception of the whole street would change. Pedestrians could discover, what they are passing by each morning and identify with this quite anonymous space. It is not problem of this particular street. A lot of Czech cities have problems with attracting people to the public space. People are simply not get used to spent their time in that type of spaces after more than 40 years of communist era, but this is another story.
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in Liberec, 2014
in cooperation with Marie Štefanová and Filip Lux
︎ PROKOP MATĚJ 2023 ︎