Veronika Hušková↓

About the work

Promised Pankrác

#cooperation #sustainability #residential street #ordinariness #atmosphere

What is your graduation work about?

Pankrác is a part of Prague that has been redrawn, rebuilt, and fragmentarily redesigned several times. It now houses the mushroomed tallest and most absurd office buildings. The Pankrác Plain thus undergoes mindless and rampant construction amidst traffic gridlock. The insurmountable modernist aura of the arterial road has cut Pankrác in half. The six-lane, hardly contestable route seems to be the biggest obstacle to the place so far. Or is it?

We imagine the city without the freeway – where cars do not rule the public space and councilors and authorities actively address the housing crisis.

My graduation work focuses on an ordinary street on the edge of this empty space in the middle of Pankrác. Hvězdova and Sdružení are quiet and not too significant streets that nowadays undercut the main thoroughfare. On the one hand, they pass between the vacuum of the so – called Reitknechtka and the cooperative construction of the First Republic and the 1950s, and on the other, run between the Pankrác II housing estate of the 1960s and the Pankrác pentagon, the site of towers, office buildings, and the Arkády Pankrác giant shopping mall.

In my work, I seek a new and, simultaneously, old form of a residential street as a place to live.

What do you do besides your graduation work?

I am trying to do a bit of activism right now, but I do not have the time, which annoys me.

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

Being calm, peaceful, and warm. And having no financial hardship.

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

I imagine finishing school either by a longer-term project with a less strict timetable or without a clear end, when and what one has to hand in. Or, conversely, with just another semester of commonplace studio work. It is hard to know if one could ever do a final project without that ever-present feeling of it being the last one.