In a city without a strong spatial structure, people lose their identity

Their presentation will be the first of the four “November Talks”, which have been bringing important international architects, urban planners and landscape architects to the Czech Technical University for the fifth consecutive year. This is part of the international November Talks lecture series, which has been supported by the Sto Foundation at the European Schools of Architecture since 2006. This year the talks will take place in London, Paris, Venice, Stuttgart and Graz. In Prague, they bear the subtitle “Transformations: Transforming the boundaries of professions in a changing world”.

The lecture by Ivana and Jan Benda will present the key research the architects undertook in the 1970s under the guidance of theoretician and art and architecture critic, Jiří Ševčík at the then newly independent Faculty of Architecture. The work, An Image of Most: Research of the Mass and Spatial Structure of the City was published in 1977 and was the first in the Czech environment to study the image of a city according to the methods of American urban planner, Kevin Lynch, who has since acquired cult-status, and the Norwegian architectural theorist Christian Norberg Schulz.

For their research the Bendas chose the "dual-city" of Most, where one part is a historic city with an original population of 35,000 inhabitants and the other a new town of Most with 60,000 inhabitants. The old Most was destroyed by the mining industry and replaced with a new city based on modernist ideals. In their analysis of the city, they examine the mental image still alive in the minds of the inhabitants of the historical Most and compare it with their mental image of the newly built city. The results show that the reconstructed image of the historic city had an extraordinary identity, based on a rich history and landscape context, but mainly on a strong and clear spatial structure. When such a structure is lacking, it becomes reflected not only in the poor topographic orientation, but above all in the lost identity and the existential suffering of the city's inhabitants.

The knowledge gained from the research carried out over 40 years ago has informed the work of Ivana and Jan Bend to this day. In their extensive work, they highlight the quality of the spatial concept and the integrity of the design in its unity of thinking and actions, in a well-balanced proportion between philosophical, technological and aesthetic values that are relevant to the time and place.

“As architects, we strive to achieve maximum results with minimal resources. Simplicity means focusing on what really matters, the purpose of the building and all its components. And it is its authenticity that makes a building attractive, no matter how old it is, whatever style it is built in or whichever aesthetic principles it follows,” say Ivana and Jan Benda before their Prague lecture.

Ivana a Jan Benda

Ivana and Jan Benda, who now once again live in Toronto after having worked in China for the past 20 years are partners in the Benda Architects studio and co-founders of Allied Architects International (AAI). Both graduated and later received PhD. degrees from the Faculty of Architecture at CTU in Prague. In 1987, they emigrated to Canada, where they began working at the architectural offices of Crang & Boake Architects. Their subsequent projects for Bregman + Hamann Architects took them to China in the early 1990s, where they moved in 2001, and founded AAI in Shanghai. Their portfolio includes hotels, office buildings, and residential complexes, including entire residential neighborhoods. Independently or in collaboration with their team, they have over 75 projects to their account in Canada and the Czech Republic and over 450 projects in China and elsewhere in the world.