“… We slowly drove past a small clearing, fifty paces wide, and in the middle of it I saw a picture that shook me to the core. In the clearing stood a large flock of dogs, large and small, red, white and black. The dogs were worried and shy. One small yellow dog was lying in the snow. A huge black dog was torn to the side and barked, but kept under the cover of the crowd all the time. And in the middle stood a large, gloomy wolf. Wolf? He looked like a lion to me. He stood alone - determined, calm, with a bristling scruff and firmly spread legs - and looked here and there, ready to attack in all directions."
E. Seton-Thompson. Winnipeg wolf
In the very center of bourgeois respectable Karlovy Vary, a modernist colossus of concrete, glass and steel rises. Its scale and appearance have nothing to do with the motley burgher surroundings, however, they do not overwhelm it either - he is just a stranger, so to speak, "a foreigner with a residence permit." The characteristic appearance of the building allows you to accurately determine the time of its construction - the turn of the sixties-seventies. Like most of its peers, the Thermal congress center and hotel complex is under threat - if not demolition, then at least a major renovation, fraught with severe distortion of its original appearance. The time when the Thermal was built and the austere brutalist architecture, very few people evoke warm feelings - both locals and visitors.
Art critics, on the other hand, highly appreciate this building, the artistic merits of which are not striking, but are read by an experienced eye. Although Thermal opened only in the mid-1970s, not the best years in the history of the country - it is the product of another, earlier and happier time, which Czech researchers call the “golden age” of Czechoslovak architecture. From the outside, this is seen as a certain exaggeration, which can be explained by nostalgia for the Prague Spring. That era has similarities with our Silver Age - a cultural boom that ended in disaster. However, the sixties of the twentieth century are somehow not associated with silver - rather with titanium. Therefore, it would be more appropriate to call this time the Titanium Age, especially since it also had its own titans.
In Soviet times, the abbreviation "Czechoslovakia" (the name of the country since 1960) was somewhat misleading: Czechoslovakia seemed to be another union republic. And although this was not at all the case (even during the years of Stagnation, certain social and even more cultural differences persisted between the countries), the development of Czechoslovak architecture as a whole followed a parallel course of the Soviet one. In the interwar years, Czechoslovakia could be proud of a strong modernist school, but the war and the deep Stalinist "freeze" that followed after a short "interlude" knocked the country out of the world cultural context. Unlike the metropolis, Stalinism of the Czechoslovak model did not produce outstanding works: the work in the genre of "mastering the classical heritage", which in the Czechoslovak Republic was called "socialist realism" (or abbreviated "Sorel"), was clearly forced. Therefore, the transition to modernism, sanctioned by Moscow, was much less painful and more natural than in the USSR.
At the same time, during the 1940s – 1950s, the generation of leading architects managed to almost completely change. People who received a diploma either shortly before or after the war came to the fore. Therefore, the "thaw" brought by the Moscow winds and eventually ended in the Prague spring, as in the Soviet Union, was not so much the time of the revival of pre-war modernism as the creation of a new one, largely based on the "import" of ideas from the then architectural mainstream (from the late Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe to non-rutalists, metabolists, etc.).
Due to historical circumstances (as we remember, the Prague Spring was followed by a new, albeit not so deep, but still a prolonged freeze, called "normalization"), it was this generation that was destined to leave the most noticeable mark on the architecture of socialist Czechoslovakia.
The liberalization of the regime in the early 1960s allowed many professionals to leave large state design institutes and open private bureaus to compete successfully. The liberation from the dictatorship of the state and the developed competitive practice contributed to the emergence of an impressive number of original buildings, among which were world-class objects. Most of them were created by the 40-year-old generation, the most prominent representatives of which were Karel Prager, Vladimir Dedechek, Karel Filsak, the Shrameki spouses and many others). At the same time, the architectural centers were not only Prague, Brno and Bratislava, but also, for example, a small Liberec, where Karel Gubacek and the SIAL group worked, creators of one of the most striking works of Czechoslovak architecture - the tower on Mount Ested.
This generation also included the spouses Vladimir (1920–1990) and Vera (born in 1927) the Makhonins, the authors of the Karlovy Vary Thermal. This couple is mistaken for Soviet architects who designed for Czechoslovakia, but they had nothing to do with the USSR. The surname of Vladimir, who was born in Prague into the family of the economist Konstantin Makhonin, who fled Russia at the height of the civil war, is misleading.
The first steps in the career of architects were associated with the "Sorela" (the project of the Central House of the Army in Prague in the form of a Stalinist skyscraper, 1953-1954), then work in the transition from neoclassicism to modernism followed (Palace of Culture in Jihlava, project 1956, implementation 1961). The sixties are the most successful in the work of the Makhonins. They won several competitions for large public buildings (the complex in Karlovy Vary (1964), the House of Culture of Life (1968) and the Kotva department store (1970) in Prague, the Czechoslovakian Embassy in Berlin (1970)), which were implemented in the next decade. It was in the 1960s that the Makhonins developed an original personal style: if a certain influence of the Tange and the Smithsons (and through them Misa) is felt in the Thermal project, then the House of Culture of Life and Kotva are completely independent works.
The creative upsurge ends with the dispersal of the Prague Spring and "normalization". Private practice in Czechoslovakia is no longer possible; architects have to return to state design institutes. The refusal to sign a letter approving the introduction of troops deprives the Makhonins of the right to participate in competitions, narrowing the range of their activities to the completion of their own, previously started projects and the implementation of the institute "routine". Their works are not published, and if something gets into print (as, for example, in the 12th volume of the "General History of Architecture"), then without mentioning the authorship.
The fate of the Makhonin buildings has developed relatively well. All of them have survived, are used for their intended purpose, although the author's interiors have been partially lost. Thermal is in the greatest risk zone, which does not have the status of an architectural monument, therefore, it can be sold out in parts and reconstructed without preserving the original appearance and interior decoration. In addition, this is not the most beloved building in the city: most of the townspeople do not perceive it as a cultural value. Nevertheless, the complex plays an important function - it is not only a large hotel that makes a profit, but also the main site of the prestigious film festival, for which it, in fact, was built.
The idea of building this structure was dictated not only by pragmatic considerations (the need to accommodate numerous guests of the festival) - it was required to create a new symbol of Karlovy Vary. The task, at first glance, is unexpected, given that the city's hallmark has been and remains its resort function and picturesque natural surroundings. The fact is that until 1945, in terms of ethnic composition, it was more a German than a Czech settlement, which was known in the world as Karlsbad. The Czech name was only official, and even then only since 1918. It became generally used only after the deportation of the Sudeten Germans and the resettlement of Czechs and Slovaks in their place, who had to settle down in a city that was not theirs. This city needed a new symbol. Therefore, the planned large-scale construction in the center of Karlovy Vary had to carry a triple semantic load, personifying Czechoslovakia, modern (technologically advanced) and socialist.
The old part of Karlovy Vary, which was practically not damaged during the war, is very densely built up. It is a long winding strip of buildings that fill the gorge of the Tepla River and climb the surrounding mountains. Accordingly, there were no free plots for the construction of a large complex in the center, and building outside of it would mean reducing the prestige of the object. Therefore, a whole quarter of the historical buildings of Chebskaya Street, located on the border of the resort area and the commercial and business area, was sacrificed.
Although Karlovy Vary dates its history from the XIV century, the ensemble of the historical center in its present form was formed by the turn of the XIX-XX centuries. A fairly accurate, albeit caustic, assessment of its architecture was given by Le Corbusier, comparing the urban development with a "parade" of cakes in a shop window. To continue the analogy, the Thermal is a coffee machine that flaunts among cannoli, meringue and religion.
The site cleared for construction was a vast terrace between the river bank and the steep, almost sheer slope of the mountain. The Makhonins, whose project won the competition, beat it in an original way, dividing the complex into two parts (large and small) and spreading them in space. Below they marked the main, larger block of the hotel and congress center, and on the mountain - its "branch" in the form of a three-story pavilion with a cafe, an outdoor pool and a terrace with panoramic views of the city. Thanks to this fragmentation of the structure and "porosity" of most of the facade surfaces, Thermal, for all its small scale, on the whole, fits well into the environment. The "implantation" was significantly softened by the natural environment, which is not only present, but dominates the city.
The volumetric-spatial configuration of the riverine part of the complex is based on the most popular archetype of post-war modernism - “Liver House” by G. Banshaft / SOM, “tower on the stylobate”. There are hotel rooms in the vertical volume, public functions (hall, conference rooms, shops, cafes, foyer, etc.) in the stylobate, and underground parking with a car service. At the same time, the external appearance of the building has different prototypes, different from the "Leaver House": first of all, the early, "Misov" brutalism of the Smithsonians and Tange's buildings of the 1950s. Structural structure - steel frame, facades made of glass and reinforced concrete panels. At the time of Thermal's design, the abstract architecture of glass prisms from the 1950s. (The Leaver House, Jacobsen's SAS Hotel or the General Motors technical center of Saarinen Jr.) has already passed the stage in Czechoslovakia (the most striking statement on this topic - the Institute of Molecular Chemistry in Prague in 1962 - belongs to Karel Prager). Buildings became more complex in composition and structurally expressive. At Thermal, both construction and materials are not only “honestly identified” according to the principles of non-rutalists and Mies van der Rohe (Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago), but also aesthetically articulated. As in Crown Hall and Mees's Seagram, the steel frame plays not only a utilitarian but equally aesthetic role. Concrete is used as a walling material - refusing its plastic qualities, the authors demonstrate the manufacturability of their architecture, i.e. high level of national building culture.
The stylobate has a pronounced two-part structure: open terraces, accentuated by a spectacular spiral staircase, face the resort area, and deaf cylindrical volumes, in which conference rooms that do not require natural light, are located. The “resort” part of the stylobate, the high-rise volume and the upland “branch” with a pool stylistically echo the building of Kagawa prefecture Kenzo Tange (1955–58) and the buildings of Egon Eiermann (in particular, with the FRG pavilion at Expo-58 in Brussels). And in the configuration of the opposite part of the stylobate, accented by concrete cylinders, the influence of Wright's later works is implicitly traced (Guggenheim Museum, Johnson's Wax headquarters).
The Makhonins did not limit themselves to the development of an architectural project, but designed all interiors, including furniture design, i.e. created a 100 percent Gesamtkunstwerk. Currently, the municipality of Karlovy Vary is applying for the status of a cultural monument, and the chances for a positive decision are quite high. This gives hope that Thermal will avoid
the fate of his "sister" - the Tbilisi hotel "Iveria", built in the same years and very similar in architecture. The next step should be the restoration of the complex, which has lost its former gloss, and the reconstruction of open spaces immediately surrounding it.
