Szymon Rozwałka presented his work in Pilsen. In architecture, he seeks beauty in uncertainty and imperfection
Szymon Rozwałka, a Polish-Czech architect, founder of the
RO_aR architects, and professor at the Faculty of Architecture at Brno
University of Technology, spoke on June 10, 2026, at the Semler Residence in
Pilsen. As part of the series “Architecture Beyond Four Borders,” he presented
his work and his approach to architecture, which embraces contradictions,
improvisation, ambiguity, and imperfection.
The second installment of the “Architecture Beyond Four
Borders” series, organized by the Pěstuj prostor association in collaboration
with the West Bohemian Gallery in Pilsen, featured a meeting with Szymon
Rozwałka—an architect who moves between the Czech and Polish spheres, various
languages, and architectural traditions. The theme of “in-between” became one
of the starting points for his lecture.
Rozwałka spoke of architecture on the border not as a
boundary between two worlds, but as a distinct space of ambiguity, tension, and
possibility.
A Challenge to the Idea of a Perfectly Controlled Order
In his lecture, he challenged the idea of architecture as a
perfectly controlled order. He was interested in the relationship of both
society and architecture to that which does not fit into the notion of purity,
correctness, and unambiguity. He also recalled the concept of normalization,
which, in his view, meant the suppression of everything that deviates from the
norm in the Czech context—irrationality, doubt, fluidity, or postmodern
thinking.
A key theme of the evening was the metaphor of the gardener,
which Rozwałka borrowed from sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. The gardener envisions
an ideal garden and labels everything that does not fit into it as a weed.
Rozwałka applied this metaphor to architecture, historic
preservation, and the public debate about the city: contradiction, dirt,
kitsch, or unexpected layers are often perceived as something that needs to be
removed. According to Rozwałka, however, an obsession with cleanliness can lead
to a loss of sensitivity toward real life.
RO_aR architects’ Projects as Encounters of Opposites
He linked these theoretical reflections to projects by his
firm, RO_aR architects. For example, he presented the Silo House in Olomouc,
where the architects worked with the original industrial structure and
disrupted it with a shifted prism. For the villa in Hlubočepy, the theme was
the encounter between the urban and natural worlds, as well as dealing with
unplanned changes to the project.
In the Yoga Garden project in Brno, the studio incorporated
a garden into a former factory in an urban courtyard and opened parts of the
interior to the sky, thereby blurring the boundary between inside and outside.
Nature Between Control and Uncertainty
Rozwałka also explored the relationship between architecture
and nature. In the Czech context, he perceives nature as heavily controlled and
compared this experience with the Polish landscape, such as Białowieża National
Park or the Baltic Sea coast.
He further explored this theme through a student project
focused on the islands in the Szczecin Bay, where students considered how the
landscape might change in the event of rising sea levels without attempting to
technically control everything.
The question of controlled versus uncontrolled nature also
arises in the current project to renovate and expand the Jiří Myron Theater in
Ostrava. Rozwałka’s studio is working here with the motif of a green hill
inspired by Ostrava’s Ema slag heap, which is intended to integrate into the historic
structure of the theater complex as a new natural layer.
Architecture as an Open Process
Another part of the lecture presented architecture as a
process that need not ever be definitively concluded. The house in Zalesie,
Poland, responds to the pine forest and avoids the tree roots, while the house
in Otaslavice is designed as a collection of smaller volumes within an
allotment garden community.
What is essential here is not only the house itself, but
also the space between the individual parts, which can gradually transform and
become overgrown with life.
The evening concluded with a competition proposal for a
memorial to Jan Palach. Here, Rozwałka rejected unambiguous symbolism of
violence and sought a sensitive way of engaging with a painful and ambiguous
memory. What mattered to him was not the aestheticization of the site, but the
ethics of one’s relationship to it—respect for time, aging, decay, and gradual
disappearance.
The lecture thus presented an architecture that does not
strive for a polished and safely legible image of the world. Rozwałka
demonstrated that its value may lie precisely in the willingness to leave room
for contradictions, uncertainty, unexpected layers, and imperfection.
This text is based on an article published on the website
pestujprostor.plzne.cz. It was written by Radka Šámalová.
| Inserted by: | Rychnovská Anna Mgr. |
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