The František Lýdie Gahura designed memorial, opened one year after the death of Tomáš Baťa, is considered Zlín’s most valuable constructivist monument and the high point of Bata architecture. Rebuilt as a concert hall with an art gallery in the 1950s, it lost all of its original architectural qualities. Had it remained as such Tomáš Bata’s name would have been erased from memory. But, a rigorous renovation of the original memorial appearance has been in the works for eighteen long years, striving for simplicity and stripping away all expendable equipment. Therefore, all the operational, technological and service features are located outside the building. The purpose of the memorial is to highlight the experiences of space and light, a suspension of time, and tranquility. Given the heritage-protected status of the building, the renovation has put great emphasis on the quality of the construction and restoration work.

Jller is part of an ongoing research project in the fields of industrial automation and historical geology. It is an apparatus that sorts pebbles from a specific river by their geologic age. The stones were taken from the stream bed of the German river Iller, shortly before it merges with the Danube, close to the city of Ulm. A set of pebbles from the Iller are placed on a 2×4 meter platform of the machine, which automatically analyzes the stones in order to then sort them. The sorting process happens in two steps: intermediate, pre-sorted patterns are formed first, to make space for the final, ordered alignment of stones, defined by type and age. Starting from an arbitrary set of stones, this process renders the inherent history of the river visible. The Jller works with a computer vision system that processes the images of the stones according to their color composition, patterns, grain or surface texture. This data is used to assign the stones into predefined categories..

There is a critical perspective in architectural design facing forward and backward. The attribute “post-digital” refers to such a reflection in a situation where computational tools have become an integral part of design, realization and use.

The project questions the architectural space, arguing that it is not an empty void but rather an environment full of envelopes for the body, creating gradients from soft to hard, individual to social, private to shared. It describes the interspaces and searches for processes and transformations of an interior textile layer or cutting patterns tailored to a body into architectural space that measures and transcribes other types of dimensions. The new envelope is not a dress anymore, although it dresses a body, and it is not yet architectural in the classical sense, although it gathers. It is seen as an autonomous space, a space of its own. It shifts the attention to the problems of inside and outside, of surface and cover, of the curtain, wall and partition. It fills the room, dresses it, while the human occupation and interaction are still allowed. The project introduces a world where there is no difference between putting on clothes and entering a space. What would it be like to live in a soft space?

“Human management”, from self-organization to discipline control, threads as Ariadne's thread through every society whose fundamental function is to plan and regulate its moral “doxa”, the modus operandi of “living together” from its bright takeoff to the final decline. The hegemonic boundaries that such a society forces upon its vassal-citizens (of whom the society consists) and territories (on which it depends) are a form of political and territorial superposition of the state and the nation, which has the legitimacy to instil the authority of its permissive or repressive institutional structures on the organization of people.

A split between modern and historical realities – whether real, imagined, projected or fantasized – has long configured modern architectural culture. The very construction of this division has proved a durable, near structural, means by which to assert the idea of a properly 'modern' architecture defined in opposition to the past. The author’s book Projectiles (AA Publications, 2011) confound exactly this attempt to divide and then distance the contemporary world from its history. Despite the broad introduction to many advanced topics, Cache even has enough steam for politics with his essay “Obama Versus Irresponsibility”, in which he espouses a social critique
of the geo-political situation in the twenty-first century where a super privileged political elite, the so called one-percenters, captured enough of society to create a superclass that leaves all others without upward mobility and ironically, despite all of social media, a misinformed and misled populace.

The project explores the potential impact of creating a new architecture-specific robotic system for the creation of complex timber assemblies. The developed system is composed of multiple collaborative single axis robots, designed to utilize standardized timber beams as a building material and for its locomotion system. The material is therefore not only used in the final built structure but forms an integral part of the robotic system, minimizing its complexity. The minimalism, low costs, lightness in weight and robustness of the entire system contrasts the current standards of prefabrication and pre-planned structures for timber-based architecture.

Humans surround the advent of new technologies with stale totems, dreams about newness, transcendence, redemption, supremacy, freedom (in all its politically polarizing liberal, neoliberal, and libertarian forms), decentralization and the frontier. It was the same for railroads and radio as it is for digital technologies.

Forensic Architecture is a research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London, consisting of architects, artists, filmmakers, journalists, software developers, scientists, lawyers, and an extended network of collaborators from a wide variety of fields and disciplines. Founded in 2010 by Prof. Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture is committed to the development and dissemination of new evidentiary techniques and undertakes advanced architectural and media investigations on behalf of international prosecutors, human rights and civil society groups, as well as political and environmental justice organizations, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’tselem, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, and the UN, among others.

What is it like to flee your home and start again in a new country? Asylum seekers live on £5 a day while they wait to hear whether they can stay in the UK. The virtual reality film Limbo produced by ScanLAB Projects for The Guardian allows you to experience how this period of limbo feels, waiting for a decision that will affect the rest of your life. The piece was made after conducting interviews with asylum seekers from 12 countries as well as immigration lawyers and barristers. The voices in the soundtrack are those of real refugees who guide the viewer through their experience.The sketch-like aesthetic has the quality of a dream or nightmare where everything is transparent and fragmented. The work journeys through a collaged world of real spaces – combining mobile mapping of the City of Manchester, terrestrial scans of various properties across the UK, and a series of live action 3D scanned people.

The post-digital contradicts the usual notions of city and architecture, and crosses field boundaries – ideas from media theory, geology, or environmental studies become crucial for understanding the future of architecture in relation to Earth and to individuals. We discussed the definition and meaning of the term “post-digital” in architecture with the Finnish media theorist Jussi Parikka. Additionally we explored the deep history of media technology, non-human agency in urban contexts, the politics of corporations and digital platforms, and the role of architecture in the Anthropocene.

Cities are mostly poor ecological niches, often solely focused on a single species: us. As the need for sheltering and comforting the human species increases, our Earth becomes massively loaded with objects and structures that cannot take part in the activities of other complex living communities. The project of Hiveopolis tries to create a city oasis for the many animal species living alongside us. Using a combination of designed (3D print) and self-organised (life) principles we construct a patchlike environment of mycelium hyphae, honeybee colony, humankind and built environment. This superorganism will help to open up the urban niches to support vegetation, pollinators and ultimately a whole ecosystem emerging around them.

At the dawn of the 4^th Industrial Revolution, it is safe to assume that in the developed world (but, not only) digital technologies have fully been assimilated into all aspects of our lives – from banking to flying an airplane, from medical procedures to shopping, etc. We are now in an era categorized by a wide range of technologies ready to hybridize our physical, digital and biological domains, ready to adapt humanity's habits and habitats to a networked, data-driven, bio-technological world. A world of interchange where cross-contaminations and constant negotiations provide less confrontational human-nature scenarios towards a more conjoint, co-operative future.

Liam Young calls himself a techno-optimist and a speculative architect. In an interview with Irena Hradecká he reveals what this position means and what kind of influence digital technology, artificial intelligence or social media has on architecture and our environment in general.

Buildings without people already are an inseparable part of our urban and suburban space but often lack proper architectural integration. These are buildings inhabited not by people, but machines; built to produce, share, redistribute or store. Rooms without daylight, facades without windows, floors without stairs. Smooth surfaces and glazed facades are today’s hallmarks of modernist architecture. Architecture without ornaments or “X-ray Architecture”, as defined by Beatriz Colomina, now faces the challenges of the post-Anthropocene where it isn’t just the actions of mankind but machines which globally affect the Earth’s ecosystem. How should architects respond to the challenges of the new era and the environments in which they are located? The following projects were made in Studio Architecture III at the Academy of Art, Architecture and Design in Prague under the supervision of Imrich Vaško and Shota Tsikoliya in 2018/2019.

Based on the notion of social and interspecies participation that also crosses the borders of the architectural profession, the project discusses the use of digital technology as a tool for individual architectural work and also the development of the collective imagination. Digital technology becomes an instrument for visualizing an idea that is individually understood and collectively realized. Collaboration plays an important part in professional, interpersonal and interspecies relationships. The diploma project was supervised by Imrich Vaško and Shota Tsikoliya in 2018/2019.

We talked with Greg Lynn about his research in augmented reality at the Angewandte in Vienna and at UCLA in Los Angeles, about intelligent machines and robotic architecture, about the Boston based firm Piaggio Fast Forward, about the Venice Architecture Biennale, global warming and nuclear power, about design and other contexts of high performance design. Greg Lynn is still a person of tremendous importance for the development of digital architecture in Prague and Bratislava. He visited the AFAD and UMPRUM repeatedly and was also one of the speakers at the first Experimental Architecture Biennial Prague in 2013.

Today, architecture is caught between two competing subcultures of imaging, each of which has different priorities with respect to new tools and media. On the one hand there is a culture of rendering, in which the image is basically regarded as an “output,” or end product, often for promotional ends. On the other hand, there is a culture of fabrication, in which computer images are used only to accurately and efficiently simulate or imitate numerical-material processes.

Artificial intelligence (AI) offers profound opportunities for innovation in architectural design. The ability of a machine to learn, think, and act will fundamentally change the way in which we design. This project teaches a machine by example: giving it sets of data and training it to search for latent patterns embedded in 2d drawings and imagery. This is a reconfiguration of the traditional relationship between human and machine – the machine is no longer a passive tool that does exactly as it is told, and the design process is no longer fully deterministic. The very definition of design is currently undergoing a decisive transformation: humans and machines work together; design designs itself.

Finch is a plug-in to programming tool Grasshopper within the 3D graphics software Rhinoceros. The tool is designed to help architects understand the potential of a project or a project site in the early stages of the design process. Everything designed with Finch will be responsive, meaning the designs will be able to fit and adapt to multiple locations and scenarios. This is a paradigm shift in architecture, leaving the static way of thinking behind and instead of creating independent designs, we’re now looking at creating systems and families. Finch will be launched in 2020.

Both the technical sciences and the humanities experience the ubiquitous influence of computer technology. The process of their digitization and computerization has been going on since the mid 20^th century, while the first Digital Humanities study programs started to emerge at the turn of the millenium. Digital Arts, a related study program, is currently being prepared for accreditation at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava. In an email interview we asked its initiators, Monika Mitášová and Marian Zervan, about the new study program and the circumstances of its inception.

The Archive of Affinities is a constantly updated collection of architectural images that exploits the dual meaning of affinity and the likeness associated with the word as both personal predilection and the relationship between things. The Archive of Affinities is not an archive of the canon or of tradition, but rather of the overlooked – the architectural B-side. If the canon is a solar system, the Archive of Affinities is a galaxy. While the canon is lethargically limited and exclusive, the Archive of Affinities is briskly expansive and inclusive. The Archive of Affinities is endless and seeks, searches out, and scans each architectural image – good, bad, and ugly. This collection of useless architecture with overwhelming architectural qualities is arranged in multiple ways.

In the post-industrial part of Brno, a fifteen-minute walk from the city center, a new apartment house comprised of fourteen flats and ground-floor commercial spaces fills a long-vacant lot. Owing to its height, its refined exterior surfaces, and the neon artwork by Petr Dub, the five-story building has become a new landmark in the area. The height corresponds with the surrounding buildings while still adhering to the current city regulations, which also proposes future traffic calming of the busy intersection with the construction of a new park.