Dominik Vácha↓

About the work

Promised Pankrác

#sustainability #urbanism #density #15 – minute city #new Pankrác center #sustainable neighborhood #degrowth city

What is your graduation work about?

Promised Pankrác reflects on what our cities could look like with all the currently available tools and resources provided the political and social will to transition to a sustainable economy. We do not want to make unnecessarily grand gestures or demonstrate the only possible approach to sustainable urbanism. We believe the project’s strength lies in the collaborative model and the diverse attitudes linked by a unifying idea. We do not compete with each other. On the contrary, we learn from each other, present each other our ideas, continuously consult, and join forces to make our voices heard. It is the voice of classmates, the collective, friends, and a generation. As in issues of society as a whole, in solving this particular design, we try to understand the mistakes that we, as urban/world dwellers, inherit from our predecessors and that we are the last ones to correct. We transform the anger and grief of a crumbling world, which we have yet to fully perceive in a global context, into a hint of a way out of the crisis via a materialized image of a “new” city. What might our lived environment look like if we would quit treating the environment as a resource and instead begin respecting the Earth as a home that we share with other people, plants, and beings in mutual symbiosis? In this respect, Pankrác amply manifests the failed free-market deregulation also apparent in urbanism – it is a district devastated by car traffic and corporate headquarters in skyscrapers, where the only option for leisure seems to be a giant shopping mall.

What do you do besides your graduation work?

I do a lot of gardening and occasionally engage in climate activism. I work in my field, enter competitions, design mostly apartment and house renovations, and I dream of my own architectural practice.

In what conditions would you like to work on your graduation work?

I think it would be better for us architects to have two semesters to work on the diploma alone, such as in other studios.

What would you imagine to be an alternative culmination of your studies at AVU, in place of the defense of your graduation work?

I would throw a big party in the studio to say farewell to the school premises. But this will happen anyway in the case of graduation works defenses, which I see as a beneficial gathering of teachers, opponents, and friends, and last but not least, a reflection of the whole study, its formal conclusion.