Since the very beginning of our planet's existence, its environment has been shaped by the regular changing of days and nights, periods of light and periods of darkness. All living organisms, including humans, evolved in this environment and adapted to the natural cycle over many millions of years. Until the end of the 19th century, the only sources of light during the night were fire, the moon, and the stars. With the invention and proliferation of artificial lighting, however, people began to change the night environment in unprecedented ways, outside and inside their homes. Discussing this with lighting expert Hynek Medřický, we reflect on the possible consequences of this change and whether we can actually grasp all of them.

The department stores’ golden era is definitely gone. Yet there are still ways to keep these structures not only alive, but to imbue them with new relevance. Architect Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli—who previously explored this topic at OMA and now continues to focus on similar projects through his own studio, 2050+—spoke with us about the future of department stores and the possibilities for their transformation.

Referencing local town houses lined with ground floor arcades which dominated the area until the 1960s, the design of the Nové Lauby apartment building in Ostrava forms a single compact city-block volume to reinforce the historical street structure. The building mass changes appropriately to the immediate surroundings. Some design features on the ground floor, a changing height of the cornice and different window arrangements suggest where individual houses of the block start, but overall the building has a unified character. Functionally, it uses a set of five separate communication cores. Inside the block there is a quiet courtyard. The ground-floor restaurant facing Velká Street features a series of arched windows shaded by a shallow overhang. This wider section of the street forms a pedestrian zone as a continuation of the existing Old Town Hall arcade.

You are what you eat. This motto from an early-2000s reality TV show can be rephrased into something even more telling: you are the culture you consume. But can culture really be consumed? Misunderstanding culture as an object of consumption leads to its degradation into mere leisure entertainment—and misses the meaning of the word, which comes from the Latin ‘colere.’ This conflict of interpretation has recently surfaced in České Budějovice, as the city prepares for its European Capital of Culture (ECoC) term in 2028. The political leadership and the cultural public clearly subscribe to very different definitions. And it’s becoming clear that when culture is approached the wrong way, the ECoC title might end up doing more harm than good. The effects are most visible in architecture and in how public space is managed. In short, České Budějovice seems to be headed toward international embarrassment.