Carel Coetzee

The city of Plzen, in the Czech Republic, presents two distinct urban figures when viewed from above: the outline of the medieval city wall, demolished in 1795, and the outline of the vast industrial complex known as the Skoda Works. The perimeter wall of the Skoda Works remains unbreached and it meets the city with a sharp edge on the corner of Tylova and Korandova Street. An ambiguous urban and psychological relationship exists between Skoda and the surrounding residences, some of which were remodelled by the renowned Austrian architect Adolf Loos. 

The interior nature and rich palette of reflective materials from Loos’s architecture provide the starting point for an investigation of smoke, mirrors, and masks as, firstly, a series of fragment architectures and finally, an urban proposition for intervening in the fabric of the Skoda Works. This is enabled by a contemporary re-imagining of Hedvika Liebsteinova, a former resident of a Loos apartment at 58 Husova Street. The spatial entanglements of her domestic and working life mirror a current phenomenon that points towards larger trends in the Czech Labour market and suggest the rethinking of these previously single-entity industrial complexes as smaller, more vibrant, mixed-use locations for urban living and working. The re-evaluation, reworking, and elaboration of existing masks found in Plzen’s built fabric changes their two-dimensional veneer into thickened and porous space. This porosity allows the mask to become a communicative tool and simultaneously a lens through which to understand the surroundings and open dialogue between previously separate urban conditions. What is proposed for the Skoda site is a serial intervention of new masks, as architectural program, forming a new district of the city that intervenes upon the existing industrial fabric and builds in scale and density over a time-period that the slow de-industrialisation permits.