Annual Architecture Day to explore places related to Kafka

The annual Architecture Day festival gets underway on Friday in more than a hundred cities and towns across Czechia and Slovakia. The week-long event will offer free guided tours of both famous and lesser known buildings, which are usually inaccessible to the public, as well as lectures, film screenings and family workshops.

The 14th edition of Architecture Day, organised by the association KRUH, takes place under the subtitle “Trial of Transformation”, which refers, among other things, to the 100th anniversary of Franz Kafka’s death. Marcela Steinbachová is the festival’s director:

Marcela Steinbachová|Photo: Barbora Linková, Czech Radio

“We were inspired on the one hand by the life of Franz Kafka, so we will offer guided tours through places where he lived and wrote. But we were also inspired by the topics that he addressed in his books. We will visit some bizarre public spaces and industrial buildings and also explore the changes that public spaces went through. We will also have guided tours with writers and poets, so I think it will be really interesting.”

Within the Kafka-related programme, people can take a guided tour of the New Jewish Cemetery in Prague, or walk in the footsteps of the famous Prague-born Jewish writer and his fiancée, Felice Bauer, in Marianské Lázně.

This year’s Architecture Day will also highlight German and Jewish architects and Kafka's contemporaries, including Ernst Wieser and Rudolf Wels, who shaped the current appearance of Czech cities, much like how Kafka shaped Czech literature and culture.

The programme will also commemorate some significant personalities of Czech and Slovak architecture, among them Karel Hubáček, the author of the famous TV transmitter on top of the Ještěd Mountain, says Mrs. Steinbachová:

Ještěd|Photo: Klára Škodová, Czech Radio

“Karel Hubáček’s buildings are mostly located in the regions. So you can travel to Liberec, the seat of his architecture office, where his famous TV tower is located. But you can also visit the cinema in Doksy, and other cities, such as Česká Lípa and Teplice, which also feature buildings designed by his studio or his collaborators.”

Simultaneously with the Architecture Day, its sister festival of Film and Architecture will be held in cinemas in Prague, Brno and more than 40 other cities in Czechia and Slovakia, presenting films on architecture, cities and design.

This year’s motto, Weirdness and Otherness, has also been loosely inspired by Franz Kafka, says its director Václav Ševčík.

“We wanted to show some oddities and peculiarities, movies and architecture that we didn’t show at any previous edition of the festival. So we wanted to give space to this kind of architecture that is not known to many people.

“One of my favourite movies on the programme is called Depo - Reflecting Boijmans, and it’s a documentary about the complicated, Kafkaesque process of moving art works from a museum in Rotterdam into a new warehouse that was designed by a famous architecture studio.”

The Day of Architecture is organized in collaboration with local associations and architects, and attracts thousands of visitors each year. To book your spot for a guided tour or to find out more about the programme, visit the festival’s website at denarchitektury.cz.