Projektil – from the Life of People and Houses

The publication reflects the typically collective approach of Projektil architekti - in addition to the architects themselves, a group of collaborators actively contributed to the book with ideas and comments. This resulted in a long series of conceptual variants and, as it is often the case in cases of collective decision making, the realised variant is one of several possible

The immediate impetus for the book was the preparation of an exhibition at the House of Art in České Budějovice and the need to present the work of the studio in connection with the previous exhibition at the GJF and the catalogue/book 01., especially through the realization of the Ecological Centre Sluňákov near Olomouc, the Study and Research Library in Hradec Králové and the construction of the National Technical Library in Prague, the Museum of Baroque Sculptures and Monastery Gardens in Chrudim.

In the background of every "book about architecture" is the question of how to present classical and contemporary processes, categories and ultimately architectural forms themselves through two-dimensional images in the medium of a book. What is more pressing, however, and relates specifically to Projektil's approach, is the question of how to represent architecture designed on the basis of collective laboratory experiments with the articulation of the public and the social inherent in the studio. The option that the authors of the book have chosen could be called a collective social document.

Projektil invited the public - residents, visitors, users - to document their own buildings. Their photographic contributions, in their entirety (without censorship) and in the form they were submitted, form the body (or construction?) of this book. Again, there were several ways to sort the material thus spontaneously generated. The collective preparing the publication eventually decided to sort the material on the basis of a more or less intuitive classification of individual and collective activities.

The purpose of the publication is therefore not to state that the activities of residents and visitors animate buildings or "give them life", but to proclaim that building projects and buildings themselves are created on the basis of public activities, and that their documentation by the apparatuses of residents and users is therefore a gesture. The resulting form of the book is characterized by the fact that it should generate rather than directly show.

It presents 912 photographs, but suggests associations between events, activities and forms, between images and words, texts - the publication should serve as an engine of a series of synapses, that it should generate rather than directly show. It presents 912 photographs, but suggests associations between agency, between activities and forms, between images and words, texts - the publication should serve as an engine of a series of synapses, rather than a closed presentation.