Sesam öffne dich!

it has been the second time this year that it works: visiting an architectural sight i read texts about/in front of them and they wondrously open! a text about ulrich müther’s rescue station on the island rügen this spring suddenly brought the appearance of his widow asking “what are you reading there”, with the result of a really nice conversation and some doors more opening.

this time the read aloud of a deutschlandradio-transcript about the architect couple vera a vladimir machoninovi brought photographer alena drahokoupilova out of their building for the czechoslovak embassy and me and the group of architecture students, which i was entrusted to take them on a berlin_walk, into the building.

alena currently works for the berlin.czechcentre, which is somehow comparable to the german goethe institute as she says, and the berlin.czechcentre not long ago moved into the brutalist building that is now mainly used by the czech embassy. vera a vladimir machoninovi only realized a fistful of buildings, one of them a shopping centre in prague that deeply impressed me when i visited the czech capital long ago and i didn’t know who designed it until the unexpected visit to the embassy. we were shown around the berlin.czechcentre’s rooms and told that it’s a shame that we cannot enter the embassy’s main rooms including the beautiful auditorium that are still furnished with the original designs by machoninovi. at least monika stepanova, director of the centre, bought some furniture from the czech company that produced the original designs for her own office as she tells. the part of the building the centre occupies was rented out inter alia to the max-planck-institut and the original furniture got lost, the rough concrete, the wooden fixtures, the exposure system underwent some change.

beside some really nice talking about brutalism and the reception of post-war-modernist architecture built by socialist societies in czech republic and germany, we had the chance to see rarely opened rooms, that belong to the best workplaces i’ve seen so far in berlin. a judgement that alena shares, even where she tells that the single glazing and the air conditioning of 1978 brings them hot summers and very cold winters on their desks.

in the end anlena’s colleague suggested the exchange guided tour for suscribing to the centre’s newsletter that i agreed with and add the bonus of asking you to do so too:

ccberlin@czech.cz

http://berlin.czechcentres.cz/

https://www.facebook.com/TschechischesZentrum