Architect Ivan Koleček dedicated 13 years of his life to repairing the church of the Benedictine abbey. He had to find a solution not only with preservationists, but also with the building itself. He finally decided to strengthen the collapsing walls of the Swiss cultural monument with a technique that no one had used to a similar extent until then. A graduate of the BUT Faculty of Architecture still shares his experience with students. He travels to Brno several times a semester to teach, where he could not even look for twenty years due to emigration.

One of the chapters of your professional life closed last year. How significant was the reconstruction of the Benedictine church?

It was a thousand-year-old monastery church from the old Romanesque abbey in Payerne, a town of ten thousands population between Lausanne and Bern. It turned out that the church was in such a condition that it was in danger of falling, and water was leaking into it. In history, churches have been rebuilt, but always in parts. Part of it had to remain standing so that it was possible to place an altar somewhere and celebrate Mass before the church arrived. Probably also due to constant reconstruction, one of the walls of the church began to fall. The builders had known this before, so they added a Gothic chapel, on which they leaned the wall. At other times, they used supporting pillars or secured it with horizontal rods. When we started working, the structural engineer came up with the idea that, according to his calculations, the church was to fall when they built it. But in the end, it lasted a thousand years. I always say that the church has its secrets, which we have not been able to reveal even in the thirteen years we have been working on. Our main task was to figure out how to save him from falling. During the work, other problems began to be added, so that today the church is completely repaired.

What obstacles did you face?

At the beginning the problem was getting money at all. At the end the reconstruction cost 20 million Swiss francs, which is about half a billion in Czech crowns. Switzerland has two military airports and one of them is in Payerne. Two fighters used to fly over the monastery and pieces of plaster fell due to the shock wave. City councilors took advantage of it politically, and suddenly something began to happen with the repairs. Then we won an architectural competition, where, in addition to the project, we prepared a text about the approach and method of restoration.

So your biggest challenge was to make sure that the thousand-year-old church did not fall. How did you do it?

The preservationists imagined horizontal rods between the facades across the interior. I stated that if they insisted, I would not do the reconstruction. The church in Payerne is something so special that the space would suffer a lot by using such rods visible in the space. They understood this and we designed a completely unique solution, and that was to use vertical rods. This was so unusual that for four years it was dealt with by several monument protection authorities. Tilted vertical rods push on the small vaults in the side ships and they in turn push on the main ship. It is a system that has not yet been used. We decided to drill through the walls, which are about twelve meters high. We still had to drill just as much into the ground. The tie rods are concreted in the ground and at the top they look similar to tightening a nut on a bolt. It gradually attracts and, if necessary, it is possible to manipulate the rods. The geometry is continuously measured to see if the church is moving. At the same time, we were quite limited. In core drilling, water cooling or vibration causing vibration is commonly used. In our case, this could not be done. I think something exceptional has happened, simply because we have been allowed to do so.

After securing, you still had work to do on the facades, which were very dirty.

The facade was completely blackened in some places as a century of pollution settled on it. With the new technology, we were able to clean the walls inch by inch with a laser in two years. The locals did not even realize what they were walking around on a daily basis. As the church was gradually repaired, they began to notice. The walls, which used to have plaster, but were subsequently beaten at one of the restaurants, were lightly whitewashed. The structures of the wall are still visible, but the whole building has a uniform expression, where the volumes of individual parts of the Romanesque church, so characteristic of its architecture, can be well perceived.

How did you deal with what could no longer be saved?

If something is too dilapidated, it will be replaced, but with a modern solution. In a restored painting, you sometimes no longer know what is preserved and what is new, and how much the painting is still an original work. We tried to preserve. We wanted to keep as much of the original, inherited as possible. We want to pass on the monuments to future generations in such a way that they not only understand them, but that they do not need to criticize us for what we have done. I always say that if our intervention is not visible, we have done a good job. The roof also had to be redone. We took off all the bags and it turned out that over the centuries only the ones that were bad. In the end, therefore, the roof is a nice example of history. Even in Payerne, it was one of the largest roofing factories. While the cathedral in Lausanne has all the new tiles, in Payerne we put the  old good ones, back on the roof.

So will it be known in the future that the church has undergone such a major overhaul in this millennium?

Some buildings are so perfectly defined from the beginning that there is more or less nothing to do with them. It is said that when Mies van der Rohe finished Villa Tugendhat, the owners only had to decide where to place the flower vase. In Payerne, some things are brand new. The floor of the church from the reconstruction from the 60's is made of concrete and stones are laid on it. We used this and made underfloor heating or hidden electrical wiring. We also invented lighting, which is not easy at all in such a space. We also had to figure out how to make a space accessible for wheelchairs. It's such a new layer, a new page inscribed in the book of church history in Payerne.

Despite the fact that you have spent most of your life in Switzerland, you go to Brno quite often to teach young architects. How did you manage to re-establish the relationship with the school you graduated from?

I was not in the then Czechoslovakia for twenty years, I was even convicted for staying abroad. When I visited BUT for the first time after the revolution, the then Dean of the Faculty of Architecture, Ivan Ruller, asked me if I would like to teach. I was interested in it, so I started teaching in the Czech Republic in 1990. It seems completely natural to me that I work, build and teach. In my opinion, in principle, only those who build should teach in studios. I enjoy teaching, less I like, it's 1,000 kilometers away. I drove for 12 hours for about 25 years, taught for two days and then drove back. I'm not saying that online teaching suits me, but it simplifies thing for me a lot. When I go to Brno, I have been flying over Vienna for the last few years, it is not very possible to manage on the highway. As long as students respond well, teaching make sense to me. But it also depends a lot on the teacher if he can inspire them. When I ran the last studio, the students published a book at the end of it, which summarized two years of our joint work. That made me incredibly happy.