Maroš KRIVÝ

In contemporary European city, post-industrial space represents the main form of obsolete, empty space. I will start by presenting the critique of two main methods of its transformation - speculative redevelopment and conservation. I will then track the origins of a different architectural and spatial sensibility in the work of Gordon Matta-Clark, Robert Smithson and Bernd and Hilla Becher. Their work tries to escape this opposition. Instead, it explores the aesthetics of the empty space itself. But this does not mean that it would escape the „political“ choice between redevelopment and conservation. On the contrary, it aims to change the whole setting of the problem. It is political in the precise sense that it refuses the existing form of the question and rather than giving another answer, it gives a new question. It explores the empty space as such and it focuses on such moments of cities and architecture which are considered as incomplete. But it looks at them as at any other spaces and architectures. Their work gives voice to the before and after of architecture, to ruins and ruins-in-reverse and explores their own autonomous existence.

The presentation will be followed by the short presentation of my own work, in which I explore the problem of architectural „distribution of sensible“ and of the contemporary urban ruins-in-reverse.