sng_2016-05-12_high-single-crop_k3

was that either to allow for or to ignore context. The historical
Water Barracks building was an impulse to allow for context, as
was Harminc’s Hotel Carlton Savoy, Fuchs’ Rosenthal rental
residence and even Belluš’ Hotel Devín. The lay public understood,
and still understands, Dedeček’s solution to be an example
of acontextualism. There is some validation of this opinion in
Dedeček’s text: “We did not speculate over the relationships
in composition or arrangement between the SNG buildings
and the buildings we proposed to demolish, for a range of
objective and subjective reasons”. Yet this sentence addresses
only some of the buildings, indeed those slated for razing;
it particularly concerns a defined portion of architectural context.
Even toward the buildings not meant to be knocked down,
Vladimír Dedeček never showed a desire to play up their external
similarity or historical morphology. To the contrary: he was
building, as became customary for him, his own internal context
for the whole site. All the alternatives in his design show that
the individual SNG buildings share the inclusion of a variety of
anterior architectural and urban design forms (for the gallery this
is the amphitheatre or odeum [a roofed amphitheatre], or the
stoa and agora or forum). The completed SNG buildings are for
example raised on pillars or terraced, or have walkways or continuous
balconies running around their perimeters. Contextually,
they share facing materials; and after all there is the shared
approach to design, such as shifting and terracing... / see …site’s
genesis, analysis and reflection p. 33–37 and Architectural interpretation, p. 24, 74–75 /.
The new formation of the site’s internal contextuality is significant
in realization where, for example, the Water Barracks’ rear
facades received a new facing in common with the entire site.
This clustering of historical and contemporary surfacing is literally
“acontextual-contextual”. Such generalization of common emblems
contemporary and historical, transformed into Dedeček’s
words, created (in contrast to the exterior similarities and preservation
of historical morphology) conditions for contextuality,
both on-site and outside the site, with the neighbouring buildings
both historical and modernistic. In this way, for instance,
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