Portrait of the Architectural Scene in Bratislava

The accession of ten new countries to the EU on 1 May 2004 will bring major changes not only to the European Union but to Europe as a whole. Although business and politics are setting the tone, Brussels has also employed the catchphrase “cultural diversity.” Yet what exactly does this slogan mean? The following report from Bratislava explores this question.

The show Architektur Slowakei – Impulse und Reflexion (Architecture in Slovakia – Impulses and Reflection) in the Vienna Ringturm was widely reviewed by critics. It offered a multi-faceted review of buildings erected from the last century up to the present (curator: Adolph Stiller).
The everyday Vienna-Bratislava communication is much less rosy. If you enter “Vienna-Bratislava” in a road-map search machine on the Internet, you get the following answer: “No place matches your search. Please enter a new inquiry.” If you don’t take the machine up on this offer but instead take off in your car, the signage on the roads reveals a typically Austrian, thoroughgoing ignorance of anything resembling a capital somewhere beyond the border. The former tram connection that operated up until World War One between the two cities is almost unimaginable as you follow the twisting and winding roads to Bratislava. Austria, and especially its capital, is not only on the threshold of this New Europe, it is right in its midst. But are people here even aware of this fact?
No one from Bratislava would assume that anyone in Vienna knows anything about Bratislava. This includes architect Imro Vasko, who had been invited by the architectural critic Jan Tabor to celebrate the latter’s freshly installed architectural space in the Vienna “pool“ office. Vasko began his talk there in December of 2003 as follows: “I don’t think any of you have ever been to Bratislava“ and then proceeded to present the project he submitted in an architectural competition for the center of the city. Incidentally, the project was a hit owing to its experimental nature and its structured, though somewhat chaotic, approach. A statement against investor architecture, you might say. The days of obsequiousness have long gone by even in Bratislava.

Dual awakenings

Isabella Marte, curator of the Architekturzentrum Wien, wrote the following preface to the AZW publication hintergrund (background), a documentation of the Vienna Architectural Congress in 2002 entitled “The next Europe”: “The patronizing policy of the West - treating the Eastern European countries as ‘supplicants’ who have to work hard to become ‘ready for Europe’ - is quite a sterile basis for mutual rapprochement. Regardless of any clear-cut political, legal, administrative, or economic guidelines the accession candidates may have to comply with, there is a broad realm that is not definable by regulations and evaluations, namely, the treatment of the intellectual and cultural heritage, be it art, music, literature, or architecture and urban planning.”
One congress later, in 2003, Gerhard Schulze, sociologist at the University of Bamberg, gave a paper entitled Steigerung, Annäherung, Expedition. Über den Wandel von Stadt und Gesellschaft im 21. Jahrhundert (Exaggeration, Convergence, Expedition. Urban and societal change in the 21st Century). He addressed the clear difference between Eastern European and Western European cities and their development - noting a “time of dual awakenings.“ In his opinion, the city is a “symbolic space for local identity” that can either be viewed as a “given structure” or as a “given process”. In regard to this symbolic space the West’s emphasis is on the improvement of living conditions and on the reflection on its culture. The East has followed up on its period of “urbicide” with a phase of “revitalization”, of “reanimation”, and is on the way to “experiencing successes”, as Schulze put it. If one accepts these definitions, then the West and the East are synchronized, drawing closer for a time before diverging again.
For the East, this entails primarily grappling with history and in more concrete terms: investments in infrastructure. Slovakia, like Slovenia, is striving primarily to achieve functionality, which is manifested for instance in the construction of its road system. These efforts still divert a lot of the much needed energy for developing an urban space as a “symbolic space for local identity”, in a manner resembling the West.

Bratislava: luxurious and idyllic

Bratislava, with an estimated number of 450,000 people, is a comparatively small city. As it has not been a capital for long, it has been able to be oblivious to power politics. The city’s architecture reflects these traits up to the present. Although Bratislava plays a special role in the young Slovak state - its unemployment rate is the lowest in the country and attracts the largest investments - the historical center has an almost idyllic feel to it and is equipped with a luxurious shopping district. The government is center-right on the political spectrum. Bratislava’s mayor, a Christian Democrat, believes in privatization, as is typical of most Eastern European countries. The Danube bank will play a significant part in the future cityscape; most of the properties along it have already been sold. Forming a front before the city, this area will shape the face of modern Bratislava.
Slovakia once belonged to Hungary and later on used to be Czechoslovakia’s perennial side-kick. It shares forty years of joint history under Communism with the Czech Republic. Although Slovakia passed through a brief span of independence at mid-century, only in the period after 1991 the country has for the first time been able to develop its own culture and history. Although the land had been centrally controlled by Prague for a long time and had been shaped by many influences from the capital, architecture has always been a primary aspect of this history. This has been especially true since Bratislava received its own Applied Arts School and since the Technical University added a separate School of Architecture in 1947. One of its alumnis is Dusan Kuzma, for instance, who lent his name to the most prestigious architectural prize in Slovakia. Other training grounds were naturally Prague and Brno, but also the Bauhaus in Dessau or Vienna. All of these influences are perceptible throughout in Bratislava, yet much more distinct than in the Czech Republic or in Russia. This is because the country was never able to cultivate its own identity for any extended period of time.
Under Communism, all planning was done by the “Collective Architectural Offices”, i.e. state-controlled groups of architects. This includes public buildings, such as the National Gallery on the banks of the river Danube, which architect and Vice President of the Architectural Association Ján Bahna called a “symbol of the monumental Socialist architecture of the former regime.”
Nowadays, the architectural firms in Bratislava work independently and can hardly be divided into “young” and “old” as their Western counterparts. After all, it was not until 1991 that any of them could even start building in their own name. Martin Pasko from “MSTUDIO” worked in Vienna in the 1990s at Ortner & Ortner. He and his partner Zoran Michalcak now believe in their futures as architects in Bratislava. He rarely looks to Vienna, although he has opened a branch office there. By contrast, non Slovak architects have a harder time gaining a foothold in Bratislava. Most investors are still Slovak and tend to turn to Slovak architects. Scarcely any colleagues have managed to establish themselves in East and West except the Dutch architect Erick van Egeraat, who is in charge of offices in London, Rotterdam, Prague, and Budapest. Egeraat has also designed a master plan for the riverbank promenade in Bratislava, one of the most important areas for urban expansion in Bratislava. It covers about 50,000 square meters of land and is to be completed by 2007.
Things may change with EU accession. Although business is conducted in isolation, universities and the architects themselves cannot help but be influenced by the “international situation”, according to Ján Bahna from the architectural firm AA (Atelier Architektúry). He and his colleagues see a lot of Austrian influences in Bratislava; he himself prefers more international models.
Bahna is a dedicated architect in the SAS (Association of Slovak Architects), with his own architectural gallery and the magazines Projekt and Forum to show for his efforts. Besides these publications, which are partially state subsidized, there is also a magazine called ARCH, launched by architectural critic Martin Masek, and several Slovak Internet platforms, such as archinet, the only one also published in English. The architectural scene is lively and has been diligent for years at establishing ties with colleagues abroad. The Academy has long sustained an exchange program with the Vienna “School of Applied Arts” where Jan Tabor has been a visiting professor since fall 2003. The American architect Greg Lynn was conferred an honorary doctorate in recognition of his commitment to exchange programs for Slovak students.
Bratislava is an amiable capital with a lively flair. No extravagant excesses have marked the city’s history or its architecture and yet there are modern relics of the Czechoslovak era everywhere. Its jewels are receiving recognition at last and will soon be revealed in a comprehensive architectural guide. In Bratislava it is hard to find exaggerated historicism and postmodern excesses of the kind prevailing in many Eastern European cities from Zagreb to Moscow. The charm of the East bloc is really present only in isolated instances and in a handful of outer districts – just as in Vienna. This is yet another aspect awaiting exploration.