A while back, you were one of the judges in the student architectural context ‘Theatre for the 21st Century’. This was a contest of ideas for a new theatre in Ljubljana, Slovenia, which took place as part of the student workshop ‘Theatre Architecture – Visions and Possibilities’. What are your overall impressions from the contest?

I was quite thrilled that the collective gathering of all the participants took place right at the start, which tends not to be the custom with student contests. The students had an opportunity to take in the atmosphere, discuss the assignment right at the start, and somehow crystallise their ideas within the group. This may have helped lead to more expressive designs than would have been the case if each student had been left to search for them on their own. In a larger group a person can see what the others are doing and the person wants to come up with something unique; he or she reflects, lets him/herself be inspired, and spurs him/herself on to a better performance. I was not at the Ljubljana portion of the workshop personally, but based on documentation it seems to me that the designs of the working models were almost extreme, visionary, actually experimental. When students then later worked out the specific projects at their university studios, naturally some of the edge came off. Suddenly they produced a functional building, but I think that they still retained many signs of their original appearance.

What other positive aspects are there to workshops like this?

International workshops have another specific feature: you can witness the way people from slightly different cultural backgrounds work and think. They open up better opportunities for understanding the way of thinking about architecture elsewhere. When you browse through magazines you only see the results, and you can’t fully imagine how the architect arrived at them. We are all from Central Europe, but our communication with neighbouring countries is not as intensive as it could be.

What was the general level of the contest compared to other contests and how would you evaluate the student projects?

The results were of very good quality across the board. Today students are led at school to know how to present their projects. The catalogue, websites, overall the technical side of the contest’s implementation was well done. But I don’t think that the projects themselves in any way stood out from the average at similar contests at which a similar sample of students always takes part. These are students who are usually more active, more ambitious, their thinking is more individual, they want to take their ideas onto the market. In comparison with the regular results at schools, the projects that developed as part of the workshop are certainly on average better.

Were there any signs in the student projects of something new in the way of reflecting on architecture?

It was possible to distinguish two distinct approaches. One group of students were thinking about how to make the theatre a part of everyday life: for it to be directly in the streets, in the city, or, conversely, for the city to be drawn into the theatre. The newly designed theatre spaces blended with the space of the city. The second approach was the principle of the isolated black box that forms a frame in which a person perceives a different level of reality, and which, on the contrary, isolates a person from regular life. And these approaches were reflected in the final design of the projects – which constituted either systems of urban yard areas, where individual scenes were performed, or studios that were built like monoliths into inner courtyards, underground, or elevated on legs over the city.

You’ve judged more than 50 projects created by students at faculties from five Central European countries. Do you see any differences between them?

I was a little surprised that the three projects that seemed the most successful were all from one studio, specifically, by students under one teacher, Vojteh Ravnikar of Ljubljana University. These projects caught my attention for the way in which they worked with the city and the urban design they used to incorporate the operations of the theatre. Often it wasn’t so much a building but rather an urbanistic structure that was designed and integrated into the existing town. The students who live and work in Ljubljana had an advantage in that they had an opportunity to remain there longer and absorb the atmosphere of the place.

In what way did their conception differ from the others?

They had a better feeling for the city. They didn’t opt for massive, avant-garde designs that would hit you like a punch in the eye. That was something that appeared among the Polish students, or in the states that are somewhat further on and have a relationship to the avant-garde. They were genuinely capable of hanging a block over the city. Designs like that are of course very powerful and you say to yourself that it could possible work, but they are designs that are also simplistic. They draw attention to themselves, they are captivating, but the web of ties between everyday life and the theatre is much more subtle. It my view the designs by the Slovenian students were more thought out and more sophisticated.

What disappointed you most in the assessed projects?

I was especially interested in how the students understood theatre, how they grasped and reflected on the assignment, whether they were capable of thinking conceptually. Many of the projects were very pragmatically oriented. No rather more conceptual, poetic projects befitting the theme of theatre were created at all. The most conceptual one was probably actually the winning project, which I myself didn’t vote for, but I did think about it. That’s also why it grabbed the interest of the other members of the jury, even though in my view its architectural handling was missing something.

What do you think of the winning project?

The project creates a kind of network of squares and streets that itself becomes the stage. But if I understood it correctly, the vision of the city it creates is a romantic one, with arcades, galleries, piazzetas and narrow passageways. So it somewhat manipulates the architecture and forces it into the role of scenography, scenic architecture, which in my view isn’t entirely a good think. From a theatrical, production perspective the project is fantastic, because it offers enormous variability and connects daily life in the city to the stage. But it seems to me that it doesn’t advance architecture because it is expressed in forms that I’d look for in the 19th century. It’s too romantic for my taste, the modern city looks different.

The winning project was created by a five-member tea. What do you think about architecture in recent years being understood as a product of teamwork?

It’s very enriching, because a large creative team allows for a wider discussion. That is probably also why the winning project is so multidimensional. It’s apparent that it was designed complexly, it contains a level of communication. Also, the documentation, compared to the other projects, is multidimensional and enables a person to get a good idea of the project. But the effort to reach an understanding over a specific design can also then slide into a search for some compromise, which in the end lacks expression. And I think that this happened a little here.

So do you see the future in teamwork?

Definitely. Today architecture is almost always created as a team. It isn’t even realistic for one person to work on a large project alone. And that’s something that isn’t taught much here at schools. In their semester assignments students have to work on their projects separately. This of course is so that they can be fairly assessed. But I think that students should also have the experience of working in a team, because that will be the first thing they encounter once they finish school. They will have to be able to communicate, argue, and think as part of a team. So it isn’t just the future, it’s also the present of architecture.

27. 5. 2010 interviewed by Václav Huml