sng_2016-05-12_high-single-crop_k3

Illah van Oijen prepared the first of two meetings with
Vladimír Dedeček's work in the SNG bridging on the occasion
of his 80 th birthday – a temporary installation of architectural
analyses and photographic interpretations of his work.
Curator Monika Mitášová.
The Laudatio was presented by Professor Marián Zervan:
“… Vladimír Dedeček as a member of the third generation
of 20 th century Slovak architects was, like many others, facing
complicated and even insoluble tasks: to build city premises
and housing estates, cultural and shopping buildings, schools
and school premises, sports and multifunctional halls, to
rethink their functionalist postulates in new social conditions,
to continue with the typification and at the same time create
unrepeatable works, to free architecture from pseudohistorical
reminiscences and start a dialogue with world architecture,
to definitively come to terms with the dilemma of folksiness,
national specificity and cosmopolitanism. The results were
singular works or extraordinary artefacts, monumental projects
that were nolens volens assigning the significance to the
socialistic way of life and rituals. In Vladimír Dedeček's work
and in his approach to space and architectural form we can
see a huge effort to demonumentalize and deperfectionize
the architectural testimony using elementary techniques and
yet in very effective ways within these big gestures. It is this
that I feel is Dedeček's shift and deviation from the context
of the third modern generation in Slovakia.
Therefore please allow me to conclude this speech
which is not full of praise and address Vladimír Dedeček,
who is celebrating his 80th anniversary, in the way that
I addressed him in our first meetings, although today's
meeting is, after all, enriched by different knowledges:
Happy Birthday ‘Mr. Architect’.” 62
17 th July, the Slovak National Gallery organized a second
birthday celebration with Vladimír Dedeček in the SNG
bridging: A marathon of fifteen-minute lectures. The presenters
120