Jana Moravcová: When designing, we are working on getting all people to agree

Isn't all urban planning dynamic to some extent?

It should be. In the minds of laypeople, but often of professionals, urbanism is the physical creation of cities, the space around buildings. However, it also involves processes, non-physical connections, and relationships. And not only the city but also the landscape.

How do you perceive the school's division between architects, urban planners, and landscapers? The field is becoming increasingly fragmented.

I respect it. But we have shared challenges. In the Czech Republic, the popular opinion now is that there is no urban planner and that there are only architects. I don't feel that way; I see a difference in my thinking. The interface is where the architect can still make it on his own and where he needs other disciplines. The urbanist is the one who brings all the perspectives together. I respect the scale, which goes up to 1:5, is design, then architecture, then urbanism, and finally planning.

In the case of the Prague Soutok (the suburban park, thaht should be born in the next few years at the confluence of the Vltava and Berounka rivers in the south of Prague), you have assembled a large interdisciplinary team with professions that one would not even think of.

When I finished teaching studios at UMPRUM, I suddenly had a lot of capacity. Until then, I had 20 working projects in my head, and another 20 student works. What now? What next? I was interested in foreign countries and the big scales that I had gravitated towards at school.

I started to work with Ivan Kroupa, where we tackled every line, solid concepts and the meaning of the profession all at the same time. Then at the Dutch EEA (Erick van Egeraat's studio), during its global boom. We worked on larger units, and I gained the basis for my current direction. I agree with the Dutch model of someone doing a master plan and preparing the conditions for other architects, but it doesn't have to be that one architect deals with the whole area, buildings and public space. From a specific size of territory onwards, it is detrimental if everything is designed by one hand.

I already knew that I enjoy large scales and feel comfortable in them. For the first time, I put together an interdisciplinary team for a competition for the residential area of Dvorce in Tabor. It included architects, landscapers, energy engineers, economists, an urban geographer and a graphic designer. We won the competition and received the jury's feedback that our team was similar to the model that works abroad. When new neighbourhoods are created, everyone puts their heads together. Not that an architect-God establishes a plan and then throws it to a traffic expert to finish the intersections.

We're also addressing in depth the visual identity of the place, including what the streets will be called. I also invited an artist to the competition to transform the Soutok. We found out that it was one of four places in the country where baskets were made in the Middle Ages, and a biologist confirmed this for us.

What impact will the information about basketry have on the area? Do you want to put some wicker objects there or bring back the production itself?

Sometimes, just pointing it out is enough. However, we have also gone through a participatory process and have come up with low-cost steps that can be done right away. For example, a workshop where people make objects associated with the park and create a co-identity with the area. This is an essential aspect if the territory is to develop, i.e. change. So that people don't see change as bad, but are ready for it.

IPR (Prague Institute of Planning and Development) refers to Soutok as a transformation laboratory. How do local communities perceive it? When I consider a place to be mine, I want it to be beautiful right away, not to be part of an experiment.

We want to do research there that the Faculty of Architecture can get involved in. We have the first hypotheses on the table, and we've done studies on visitor numbers, land prices, and green gentrification. However, the most crucial experiment at the Soutok is for all the players to agree on a shared vision. That was our approach during the design process as well. Before we drew the first line, we said that 85 % of the area is not owned by the city, Prague cannot draw something on someone else's land and expect the owners to approve it. We had extensive competition documents but went to the most critical owners ourselves.

You also managed to convince the market owners in Lipenice or the gravel miners.

We just started talking to them before we started drawing. They said we were the first to ask what they wanted, what they were planning and what investments they had in the pipeline. We wondered what people would like to see and then incorporated that into the whole meaningfully. Creating such a design is also an experiment. It's 1,300 hectares with hundreds of owners, they have to understand it first. We have tried to bridge the gap between the private and public sectors.

Let's move on to the Department of Urban Design at FA CTU. How would you like to lead it?

I applied with the understanding that I didn't want to make a revolution. That happened after Jan Jehlík took over, and I instead want to build on and continue his work. I want to strengthen communication, foreign relations and research. I think that the Institute has an extremely high-quality team. It creates great values and I want them to be visible. I want urban planning in the Czech Republic and the FA to be at the top European level. That is my vision.

I am used to such statements and I hear them often. But what will be the practical steps? How is a cutting-edge workplace created on a daily basis?

I started by cleaning up my act. And by that, I mean physical and non-physical order. Reviewing who sits where, what to throw out and get new. We immediately started building a database of potential international partners and scouting for grants. When I come at a time to review the entire curriculum, I will also review all the department's courses. I want to talk to every staff member and PhD student and find out their goals and motivations. And I'm also going to do some shadowing. I want to arrange with the teachers to come and see each one's teaching, to see how they teach, and what kind of education the student gets. You can't get that from a syllabus. I hope they take it positively.

You weren't teaching at the FA before you came here. Do you consider that an advantage?

It's my alma mater. When I got the news that I had won the selection procedure, I was happy to be coming home. Technology and technical thinking are very close to my heart. I'm glad I studied at the CTU. It was challenging, but I'm glad for the training we received because it was useful in practice.

Do you perceive a difference between teaching at FA CTU and UMPRUM? Does a slightly different architect come out of each school?

Yes. Engineering graduates are more versatile in practice. UMPRUM trains students in presentation and leads them to overlap with other fields. But something different suits everyone. I have a deliberate mix of FA and UMPRUM graduates in my office. However, discipline and precision are cultivated at CTU, and more engineering graduates gravitate towards order in their ensembles. And that kind of belongs to our field; I'm like that, too.

Have you also tried to achieve mutual cooperation between UMPRUM and FA?

We have collaborated between studios on joint workshops. And even the teaching of urbanism is de facto intertwined regarding personnel. Most people in the department know me; we have come into contact. However, there are opportunities for cooperation with other institutions, for example, with the Faculty of Humanities at Charles University or the Research Institute of Forestry, on tools like landscape monitoring and adaptive maintenance management. We can use the data-based approach, for example, regarding fauna migration or water management and mobility. I also want to work on deeper cooperation between the faculty and the IPR so that we can participate in applied research.

But you also speak to the public space in other ways than as an architect. Your studio NORMA used to have a gallery, and you organized summer workshops for children. Why is that important to you?

For me, it's all about education, even the gallery activity.

Educating you or others?

Both. For me, for example, we created a micro institution that received grant support and was able to invite guests from all over the world to Prague. This brings us to the roots of interdisciplinarity, which is essential to me. We focused our activities on the professional public, but other programme lines also had children in mind.

Is that a closed chapter?

Yes.

Do you regret leaving some things behind?

Mostly, it's circumstances. I'm very sensitive to what's happening around me and can't stick to established habits. The COVID came and de facto closed the gallery. We wanted to create a place where people could physically go and share ideas. CAMP (Center for Architecture and Metropolitan Planning) is working great now, VI PER gallery was created right after us. Before, there was only Fragner Gallery, which we didn't think was enough. We wanted to offer an alternative, so we used the local semi-basement, which I had no other use for. The lectures and outreach made sense to me. I don't know how to make a profession of architecture just on commission.

You're now going to realize yourself at the FA. But what are the topics you think someone should take up?

I won't tell you... But I'll give you a roundabout answer. I've noticed a discussion in the faculty about whether studios should come up with topics on their own, and whether the school should identify overarching assignments that will be better presented externally. And I rather like the bottom-up approach, letting the topics bubble up. We in the gallery were almost the first to invite landscapers in to deal with infrastructure, so I guess we were trendsetters.

Nowadays, it is the norm.

If I had to say one current theme, it's simply ecology. And that's what I've gradually come to because I come from a family of builders and like to pour concrete. Suddenly, I think about every animal at the same time.

And how do you understand ecology today, when people are numb and defensive about greenwashing?

People are starting to live more harmoniously with nature, which is not a cliché. I also see a significant change in my clients. I ask them: What will we make a terrace out of? What kind of wood? And they say, "Well, we want it to be maintenance-free, tropical. And I say, "Oh no, we don't work that way; it's not ecological. And they realize that, and at the next meeting, they say, "Oh, great".

You had the opportunity to design the college yourself and were involved in the construction of the technology centre in Mikulandská Street. At a Pecha Kucha Night event, Ivan Kroupa told the users to do what they wanted there. The new FA building, on the other hand, is considered a perfect work of art, and its author has long ensured that it is not changed too much.

There's a difference between a school with classrooms and a technology center that's made for individual shop floor operations that get refreshed over time as technology changes. Versatility was the highest parameter in terms of use. The whole wings can be connected, there are only removable wooden partitions between the rooms. Concrete is used only for the basic frame. We left the ground floor as open as possible, using prestressed beams to dispense with columns.

Thank you very much for talking to me. I hope I didn't bore you too much.

I expected you to ask me all sorts of juicy questions, such as whether I'm in a band and what I do in my spare time. I even prepared myself.

Tell me.

When I want to relax, I cut.

Hair like a hairdresser?

I've set up the studio so that when I get tired of it, I'll put the barber chair in here and just cut. I analyze it myself as a valve when I get frustrated with long-term projects. You see the result right away, and you have a happy person in front of you. And what's more rewarding than piecing together a life of nice moments?

Interview conducted by Pavel Fuchs.