necessary information from the region
November 11, 2025
International readers who, for whatever bizarre reason, follow recent political developments in the Czech Republic are probably aware of the outcome of this autumn’s election: among other dispiriting news: the appointment of an unapologetic racist as speaker of the Chamber of Deputies, the nominations of a crass PR flack for fossil-fuel oligarchs as environment minister and a Nazi-loving edgelord as foreign minister. Yes, in one sense Czech political life has finally matched the long-desired West in transforming its politcal representation into a stomch-turning parade of repulsive chancers and unqualified clowns. Or more accurately, a disturbing new echo of the “sinister carnival“, in the Romanian author Norman Manea’s all-too-fitting words, describing the entire tragic farce that marked far too much of the previous century.
Somewhat overlooked in all this foul mess is the proposal of a candidate from the Motorists’ Party, the second junior coalition partner alongside the established far-right Alliance of Direct Democracy, for the new “Ministry of Sports and Healthy Lifestyle”. Beyond the planned ministry’s distinctly Orwellian name, the likely minister is the one worth discussing: Boris Šťastný, a former medical practitioner and one-time MP for the centre-right Civic Democrats (ODS). Strangely enough, Šťastný might be the one political figure most likely to have a strong – and definitely malign – effect on the spatial configurations and politics of Czech society, both in personal and physical dimensions.
Šťastný, in short, is a significant player in the Czech private healthcare market, a circumstance unusually but tellingly overlooked by what remains of any left-wing political forces in the country. His main achievement in the field was the creation of a network of residential care institutions, under the title “Alzheimer Home“, which he eventually sold piecemeal to the corporation Penta Hospitals. Regular readers of Concrete Eye might find the name Penta familiar. It is the same private-equity group that grabbed large chunks of central Prague’s transit brownfields to fill them with money-generating… er, um construction, development, or maybe we should turnn to the classics with Gebhard and Winter’s precise technical classification for profit-minded real estate: “skulch”.
Of course, Šťastný claims no current conflict of interest in his relation to the care homes, now operating under Penta’s moniker, using the usual corporate-anodyne bad Latin, of Senevida. And, without provoking legal disputes, the present text has no intention whatsoever of making even the slighest insinuation of financial impropriety. Indeed, lacking empirical knowledge of the financial aspects, the questions now posed by a dubious corporation like Alzheimer Home, not to mention the creeping privatization of the Czech medical sector, should be those harsh, unpleasant, system-disturbing ones of social policy and even more of physical space. Exactly those questions that the political and the architectural press, despite a degree of progress and internationalization over the past few years, has shamefully ignored.
Demographic trends and aging populations are now, and unquestionably will increasingly become, a major challenge in architectural and spatial planning. Spatial practice as care – not as generating profit – needs to take a central role in architectural discussions in post-Communist Europe, paradoxically as the first generation of anti-statist market-libertarians starts to head into old age. Yet a situation in which state policy is shaped by representatives of private-sector entrepreneurship is anything but ideal. And even less so when the likely future of elder or memory care is one of corporate entities offering end-of-life residential policies essentially in trade for the residents’ real-estate assets.
A purportedly “populist” government that encourages the legalized theft of family wealth – particularly bearing in mind that in the post-Communist sphere, a privatized flat in a prefab tower block is often the sole reserve of familial capital – is little more than a cynical confidence trick played on the desperate working-class voters who put these scheeveballs into power.
May 31, 2025
As of today, The Guardian – among the irkingly twee lifestyle pieces for the affluent that now dominate its journalism – managed to publish one worthwhile article. It covers the Bridge EU report covering the over €1 billion of European Union funding that has been spent on reinforcing longstanding discrimination against the bloc’s most vulnerable, and most ignored citizens: the Roma, the disabled, the migrating. Depressing reading , to be sure, but necessary to know.
Of course, structural injustices on such massive scales as detailed by Bridge EU are not merely social but also physical. In any built environment, in any cultivated landscape, exclusion and inequality are invariably coded into its fabric; in these examples – Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Greek – the forcible separation of Roma, disabled, or displaced people from the public sphere continues, at least to a significant part, through the quiet assent of those who plan and construct the urban settings, from the ghettos or container housing through the holding pens of “residential care” often far removed from their clients’ families, up to the grim campscapes of refugee settlement.
Such architecture, to cite Anoorada Iyer Siddiqi, is “…not an object. It is one prolonged event in a history, marked through architecture. […] This architecture extends emergency and gives it form through the materialization and visual rhetoric of precarity […]”. Canvas tents, temporary housing containers, or even regular buildings repurposed, whether through state or private initiative, to degrade the lives and opportunities of those forced to occupy them: this category is as significant across Europe, east or west, as any of the monuments occupying the glossy pages of the prestige journals.
April 3, 2025
The real-estate branch of Penta, a Bratislava-based private equity firm with a rather unsavory past, just announced its plans to move the Florenc bus station near central Prague to a significantly less accessible site nearby – further from the metro station and wedged between the main rail line and the Negrelli Viaduct. More space will be available, in this new proposal, for additional high-ROI construction of the type, to cite Rowland Atkinson, best termed necrotechture: profitable yet dead spaces where international capital can safely be parked, but rather less appealing for the city’s human population.
Since the entire territory of the present bus station is currently the exclusive property of Penta, the municipal authorities have, in the words of deputy mayor Zdeněk Hřib, “practically no possibility of intervening”.
As an urban typology, the bus station is a peculiar instance of a non-place: the emptiness of the automotive sphere inserted into an urban fabric, in certain instances immediately destructive. And yet the vital significance of bus travel for the economic and human flows of contemporary Europe regularly makes the urban bus station a point of great significance, especially for the countless circular migrants without whom the continent would be utterly paralyzed. Prague’s Florenc station is, in this sense, a kind of inland port linked, most of all, to Ukraine: to the heroism of the current fight against Russian aggression, yet equally to the quiet yet no less powerful heroism of the Ukrainians (and many others from further East) who have since the late 1990s done the real work that keeps Prague and the Czech Republic going.
Our reflection on Florenc bus station aims to draw attention to the crucial social role that it still plays across borders and social strata – but also to the visible undertone of classism and xenophobia reflected in the desire to hide the station safely behind two literal ramparts. We might at least hope that the situation is at least resolved more equitably than the fate of Vienna’s Erdberg….
March 2, 2025
Unfortunately, this recently released video from Telex.hu, one of the few oppositional news organizations still operating in Hungary, has no English subtitles. But even the images by themselves are strong enough to give a good sense of the issues for non-Hungarian-speakers.
Briefly, it covers the demolition last autumn of the new wing of the Magyar Rádió building, along with several adjoining structures, to create the new Budapest campus for Pázmány Péter Catholic University, previously located at the Imre Makovecz-designed campus in the outlying town of Piliscsaba. Protests from local residents, radio staff, or even the (currently oppositional) district council were ignored.
A few remarks:
Alongside the visible arrogance of power, embodied by the Fidesz notables Zsolt Semjén and (notorious racist) János Lázár, the video also might indicate a shift in the preferred aesthetics of the Hungarian right-wing. Moving away from the playful fin-de-siecle postmodernism of Makovecz, whose organic-nationalist beliefs and personal anti-Semitism are undeniable but whose work has gained a certain historic value, it now appears to favor the stripped-down modern-classicist idiom long associated with Italian Fascism. Or, of course, the style’s reflections in Horthy-era Hungary….
Unquestionably, though, the main takeaway from the Telex.hu video is the deliberate use of demolition – undertaken, as we see, without any considerations of material reuse – as open symbolic violence. Or in other words, the desire for complete effacement of the second half of the 20th century, not only its built heritage but even more strongly its efforts, however clumsy or authoritarian, toward public cultural uplift. Particularly, the loss of the Hungarian Radio Symphony Orchestra rehearsal hall recalls the destruction of Bratislava’s Istropolis / Trade Union House not too long before. Expunging the late 20th century from physical fabric, from social memory, indeed from the continuum of history has long been a part of Hungarian cultural policy under Fidesz, note the “National Hauszmann Program” as the most blatant case. Yet even if the violence for now remains symbolic, it is no less disturbing to witness.
February 27, 2025
The online forum concrete-eye.org would like to offer its full support and solidarity to the curators of the Jaroslav Fragner Gallery in Prague and the exhibition collectives affected by the 17 January closure of one current exhibition and the cancellation of the next.
The Jaroslav Fragner Gallery organized the exhibition “Space as Evidence: Architecture as a Tool for Defending Human Rights” to run from 6 October 2024 to 2 February 2025. It involved gallery presentations from three leading spatial research teams – Forensis on the German colonial genocide in Namibia, Forensic Architecture on the Chinese detention camps in Xinjiang (East Turkistan), and Beirut Urban Lab on urban violence and urbicide in the Middle East – along with special guest lectures on, e.g. infrastructures of racial segregation in Slovakia or the destruction of the Mariupol Drama Theatre in Ukraine.
In January 2025, the rector of the Czech Technical University in Prague, the gallery’s supervising organization, insisted on making substantive changes to the gallery presentation from Beirut Urban Labs, citing alleged support for terrorism and anti-semitism. Responding to the proposed changes, the gallery and the three exhibiting teams decided to close the exhibition by mutual agreement. Despite a campaign of support from several independent institutions, the Czech Technical University has not made any public statement, and moreover cancelled the upcoming exhibition “Beyond the Borders of Architecture. Czech and Slovak Placemaking for the 99%” from the Slovak feminist collective Spolka.
Concreteeye.org would like to express its strong displeasure with the treatment of the Jaroslav Fragner Gallery by the Czech Technical University and extend its solidarity to Karolina Plášková and her curatorial team, as well as to Forensis, Forensic Architecture, Beirut Urban Lab, and Spolka in this matter.
concrete eye 