Jáchym Janský↓

About the work

Reuse Sylvie

The subject of my work is a new use (reuse) of the former Discoland Sylvie – an infamous object built in two years and opened in 1992. At that time, the space witnessed encounters of naked human bodies with white suits, politics would mix with the mafia and the mafia with culture, marble would bump into plasterboard, and a rattlesnake would entwine massive iron welded structures as well as the dancers. Multicolored neon lights poured in rays, multiplied by thousands of reflective slides, into dark boxes. Music was omnipresent. The reinforced concrete ceiling transmitted the vibrations of the two-storey Sylvie to the circular stage of the erotic bar, Veronika. And everything worked non-stop until the owner of the place, Ivan Jonák, was convicted of murdering his wife in 1994. During this period, the company’s daily turnover was almost one million Crowns of the rate at that time. The subsequent efforts to keep running the club repeated cyclically. However, all attempts at restarting the turbine called Discoland Sylvie eventually failed.

The front façade and the sign with the club’s name are the bearers of reference to me. A reference to a place that most of us have never experienced, have never entered. A space where everything was possible and which saw unimaginable. I go through this memory and I don’t think I’m alone whom this house makes nostalgic for something never experienced. I view the house as Jonák’s attempt to establish an ideal disco-land. All the money he earned from its operation went back to it as reinvestments. And Jonák also was the main Discoland “architect.” Its spaces are inscribed with his archetypes for what wealth, a bar, erotica, a corridor, a roof, a dance floor, a stage and so on, should look like. All these archetypes are glued together with a kind of inconsistent precision. They create intersections, gaps, unevenness, humps, and trickles. Cheap, expensive, bad, good, non-bulletproof, bulletproof, massive as well as subtle.

My diploma project is driven by the motivation to answer how to handle this legacy. A legacy of a house that lacks every possible architectural quality – but is a bearer of a legend.