Ladislav Jackson presents his research at the annual conference of the Society of Architectural Historians in Mexico City
The 79th annual conference of the Society of Architectural Historians will take place in Mexico City from April 15 to 18, 2026. In the panel Erasure and Resilience in Eastern European Architectures, FFA teacher Ladislav Jackson will present his recent research Czech Architects in Adriatic Paradise: Cultural Colonialism as Inter-Imperialism, which examines Czech capital and the ambitions of Czech architects in the Adriatic region and the South Slavic countries, notably Jan Kotěra.
Czech Architects in Adriatic Paradise: Cultural Colonialism as Inter-Imperialism
In the short period between 1900 and 1912, we can trace the intense interest of architects from the Czech lands in designing for Czech and Austrian investors in the Adriatic countries — today's northern Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Czech lands had been a politically secondary country since the Austro-Hungarian Compromise in 1867, but they were of primary economic importance to the empire. The Adriatic region began to play a similar role, which from the 1870s began to transform into a cheap resort for Austrian clients. This was also the case with the architect Jan Kotěra, who focused his creative ambitions on the Adriatic between 1910 and 1912. If we examine his individual projects, we see different variants of client constellations, all of which shared the same goal: to create infrastructure for the reorientation of the previously rural coastal area into a segment of recreational services, dependent on Austrian capital. This short episode in the biographies of a number of Czech architects shows the strategy of negotiating with Austrian imperial power: instead of solidarity and common resistance, the Czechs joined the Austrian imperialism of an even weaker territory with the prospect of supposed advantages. The paper shows the activities of Czech architects in the Adriatic just before the outbreak of the Balkan Wars as a symptom of the so-called inter-imperiality, a concept proposed by Laura Doyle for smaller entities that were subject to changing ambitions of domination, which is the case of the Adriatic and the Czech Lands. The Czech architectural colonization of the Adriatic shows that small countries dominated by modern empires did not have to be only in the role of the dominated, but could also be complicit in the colonization of other territories in order to gain a higher status within the imperial order. Imperialism is in this sense understood as a complex strategy of the empire to exploit the dominated lands and cultures (Austria vs. Czechia/Adriatic regions), while colonialism is rather understood as either symbolic or physical exploatation between any „center“ and a „periphery“ (Prague vs. Opatije; Sofie vs. Cetinje etc).
| Author | Mgr. Tímea Vitázková |
|---|---|
| Published | |
| Short URL | https://www.favu.vut.cz/en//f26745/d325473 |