Don't call me again. The RCIH workshop will be looking for a new use for automatic telephone exchange units.

Automatic telephone exchanges (ATE), built in Czechoslovakia from the 1960s to the late 1980s, now represent one of the most endangered groups of architectural heritage. These remarkable buildings were built for analogue technology, but soon after their completion they were replaced by digital technology, requiring neither large spaces nor human operators. They have thus lost their meaning and are disappearing in the hands of new owners.

The workshop aims to offer alternative projects for the rescue and reuse of two such endangered buildings. In the case of the ATE Těšnov, set in a block of apartment buildings, we are located in the very historic centre of Prague; in contrast, the ATE Bílá Hora represents a distinctive architecture in the middle of a prefabricated housing estate on the edge of the city. The two tasks therefore require different approaches – architectural, urban and conceptual – in the search for their optimal new programme. The workshop participants will choose one of the tasks and develop it into a conceptual proposal for a new use. The workshop will thus also be an attempt to find and formulate answers to current questions of sustainability in architecture.

The workshop is intended for students of the Faculty of Architecture of the CTU at the master's level in all fields of study (Architecture and Urbanism, Landscape Architecture, Design). It will be divided into four working sessions between February and April, exact dates to be specified in due course. Due to the conceptual focus of the workshop, the specific form of the outputs will not be predefined – it will be possible to approach the task in the form of a classical project, model, video, photographic or other artistic work. The organizers plan to present the results of the workshop at the Faculty of Architecture in the form of an exhibition and accompanying printed material.

The workshop will be included in the current NAKI research project of the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, Industrial Architecture of the Second Half of the 20th Century: Extension, Transformation and Identity, as a parallel activity to the narrative monograph on automatic telephone exchanges, which the RCIH is working on and plans to publish in the autumn of this year. Both the book and the workshop, mutually supportive and complementary from different perspectives and with a wide range of arguments, aim to bring this unique and imminently endangered layer of post-war architecture to the attention of the professional and general public as a landmark topic in architectural work, both in terms of history and the current creative perspectives of the youngest generation.

• The workshop will be conducted in Czech language and will be graded with two credits.
• Applications should be sent to vcpd.workshop@gmail.com by 16 February 2024.