Alžběta Nováková↓

About the work

Between Attention and Boredom

As if it was almost invisible. My diploma project points a finger at it. I’ve chosen to focus on a building that almost no one knows anymore to demonstrate the re-use principle, the work with an obsolete construction in today’s world. “It’s over there, next to Lidl” – that is the universal phrase I perfectly mastered over six months to describe the place of my interest. Who cares that there is the Havlíček Park, the Vršovice railway station, a freshly renovated square, and the Botič brook in the immediate vicinity of “my” Hasa stadium! We all know them, but almost no one has noticed the gigantic plot. And because I have, I point at it and develop a scenario which may help incorporate the site into the city as its equal part: so that it was not merely the place behind the popular supermarket, and the supermarket would perhaps partially disappear among all of the above.

I thus intentionally direct my attention to places that seem completely normal and may not even deserve attention at first glance. To a civil construction that does not bear the representative legacy of its time. I sometimes even have to persuade myself – after all, I could devote my time and energy to something else and more visible! And so I oscillate between attention and boredom.

My diploma sums up the subjects and issues that have interested me for a long time: the everyday life and commonness, the question of how to create an environment that is not specific in its novelty but, instead, integrates and looks like having been here for a long time. And so, I design public spaces on the banks of the Botič brook – a piazza for spending leisure time, a connection from a nearby park, a public and sports hall. But also urban housing that can benefit from the surrounding prosperous district of Vršovice, the tranquility of the nearby park, and its enclosed courtyard. By multiplying the building’s functions and increasing the number of people who will use it on a daily basis and will incorporate the place into the city, day and night, in every season. By adding interconnecting roads allowing pedestrians walk by and notice it every day; by creating local shortcuts and links. And also by forestalling what has been happening to the extensive construction so far – or, rather, that almost nothing has happened to it.