More on Architecture! Editorial ERA21 #03/2025

Filip Landa

I recently came across issues of Architektura ČSR from 1946 and Architekt from 1949 that somehow ended up in my home library. I imagined my grandchildren flipping through ERA21 in eighty years with the same fascination, trying to understand how we saw architecture and what topics were considered important. An architecture magazine is a lasting record. As Rostislav Koryčánek—founding editor of ERA21, originally focused on ecological building (ERA21 = Ecology, Realization, Architecture for the 21st Century)—once said: “Architecture is incredibly fragile, and what we write about it is incredibly fleeting. In that sense, digital media are at a disadvantage. ERA21 maps the terrain of architecture and related themes—and preserves it for the future.”

Reaching the twenty-five-year milestone is no small thing for a specialist publication, and we believe it’s worth celebrating. This issue is our way of doing that. But rather than celebrating ourselves, we look back at the last twenty-five years of architecture more broadly—and forward, too, through interviews with today’s youngest architects. It’s striking to realize that most of them weren’t even born when ERA21’s first issue came out.

ERA21 has been at the heart of key debates in architecture. It has shaped the discourse and been the first to introduce some topics in the Czech Republic—and, at times, in Central Europe. It has discovered emerging talents and helped launch some of today’s well-known studios. Thanks to my predecessors in the editor’s chair, the ERA Média publishing house, and our incredible team (listed in the masthead), ERA21 now runs like a well-oiled machine.

In his first editorial (ERA21 #01/2002), Rostislav Koryčánek expressed his hope that the magazine would be more than a short-term project. He was right. And for that, the greatest thanks go to you—our readers. Without you, there would be no reason to publish this magazine.