Pasting urbanism

In collaboration with Prof. Winy Maas and students of the FA BUT, we present a form of reflection on urban structures in the context of city planning. We focused on the site of the BUT campus and the Technology Park in Brno below Palacký vrch. Its structure has never been fully completed and the public space here is currently non-functional, but it provides a whole spectrum of possibilities. Can we transform it into a place full of opportunities in the context of the university/city in response to the current demands we have to address?

We started a radical form of reflection on this locality with an unconventional find&paste approach, which allowed us to look at the issue of Palacký Hill and the creation of the city in general from many angles. We compared and examined simultaneously not individual designs, but urban structures from all over the world (existing, utopian and combinations of forms).

This experimental procedure, different from what we are used to at the FA BUT (in the Czech Republic) in the context of urban design, allowed us to gain several fundamental insights during three months that we would not have gained in a „ regular „ way. The opportunity to compare different types of density, population levels, height diversity of selected structures, etc. gives us, together with the traditional understanding of the site, a whole new dimension in understanding the scale and possibilities of development. Thus, paradoxically, in some cases, copying and trying to implement the existing brings far more freedom and variability of approaches than developing a completely „new“ design.

The urban structures that we are applying in this area are functional units that we did not deliberately invent, but selected and then shaped. This selection was made in the context of the Palacký hill site and the great diversity of the structures under study. Today, in the context of the dramatic speed of development and pressing ecological challenges, we are looking for other possibilities in urban planning. We want to open the door to new, adaptable and variable forms of approach but often very radical ones.

Palacký hill, this complex site, will need a comprehensive and professional approach if we want to succeed in the design of the strategy/form and subsequent implementation. This solution cannot be rushed, but at the same time we need to act now. Important issues need to be discussed and raised.

Certainly we could go much further and into greater detail within this method, but we have reached a certain level that can be managed in an academic semester in this area and yet it shows us a huge range of possibilities that are easily comparable in a few simple steps.

(Kristýna Smržová)

27. Bohuslav Fuchs Award – winning studio

Tutors: Winy Maas, Szymon Rozwalka, Kristýna Smržová, Michal Palaščák, Radek Suchánek

Students: Adéla Hajdová, Alena Zelená, Andrej Toman, Aneta Galko, Barbora Plačková, Bengisu Sagmaner, Daria Martinović, Denis Kevrić, Eliška Spáčilová, Ana Fernanda Suárez, Gabriela Trojková, Chiara Krčmárová, Jakub Onuščák, Josep Xavier Alarcón, Kacper Raczek, Kamil Furiš, Kateřina Sommerová, Kristína Hlušková, Laura Valenčíková, Marko Milinčić, Martin Svadbík, Martina Hartingerová, Matyáš Černík, Monika Matejkovičová, Nelly Eva Juhariová, Ondřej Láska, Otakar Mikulka, Sára Sochová, Tereza Víchová, Veljko Čurović, Zuzanna Kasztelanic