National Library, Prague (proposed), Future Systems, 2007/Photo: Future Systems
The Czech-born architect Jan Kaplicky has died suddenly in Prague, where he was struggling to overcome opposition to his typically unconventional design for the still-unbuilt Czech national library. Kaplicky was completely an original. I profiled him for Time a few years ago in London, where he had fled after the Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia in 1968. In 1979 he established his firm Future Systems there, where he developed his ideas about an architecture in which boxes, flat planes and right angles of any kind played very little part.
Kaplicky’s buildings were fluid things that took their inspiration from billowing fabric, aircraft design, the contoured forms of nature and the curves and inlets of the human body. He was an intense and saturnine man, in my brief experience of him not someone given to smiling much, at least not when he talked about his dead serious intention to move architecture away from the Cartesian grids of Modernism. As soon as I sat down with him he started to tell me how much he hated the “Modernism” show that had opened that year at the Victoria & Albert Museum, because it had played down the contribution of Expressionist architects like Erich Mendelsohn whom he saw as precursors to his own work.
Not for nothing did he call his firm Future Systems. Kaplicky’s drawings and models — and many of of his projects never got beyond that stage — could look like something out The Jetsons. One proposal for a house looked like a long necked space alien poking its head out of the ground. It was only in the last ten years or so that he started to get major commissions. His aerodynamic media centre — basically the press box — for a cricket ground in London won Britain’s annual Stirling Prize in 1999. But the building that truly put him on the map was his Selfridges department store in Birmingham, England, a soft-loaf silhouette covered with thousands of sequin-like circular metal discs on a surface of purest Yves Klein blue. It eventually ended up on a British postage stamp.
Two years ago Kaplicky’s firm won an international competition to design the new National Library of the Czech Republic in Prague. What he came up with was an undulant design that looks a bit like a sea creature. But Prague is of course the great Baroque jewel box of central Europe and a city that hasn’t put up a major new public building since the 18th century. To put it mildly, contextualizing is not something Kaplicky does, and opposition to his definitely-post-18th century design hardened quickly. The mayor of Prague, Pavel Bern, is against it. So is Czech President Vaclav Klaus. Let the record show however that past president and eternal hero of Czech history Vaclav Havel is a supporter. But this is the man who appointed Frank Zappa to a post in his ministry of culture.
Last October Kaplicky debated Mayor Bern on Czech television about the merits of his design. (I’m trying to imagine a debate on American TV between Daniel Libeskind and New York’s former Governor Pataki over the botched reconstruction of the World Trade Center site. Never happen.) Afterwards 11,000 people signed a petition supporting his design. Will Kaplicky’s death mean that his opponents get the last word? Let’s hope not.
There’s a Kaplicky slide show here.