How do you think about music? Do you let it affect you or are you letting it be just like that while thinking about why it affects you in that way?
And how do you perceive human-made space? Are there places that influence you? Have you ever engaged in thinking about why that is? Do some places uplift you in a similar way as music does?
If you are thinking these questions or if you are at least intrigued by them, try to think about “your” places and become part of the lecture, discussion and workshop where architects Přemysl Kokeš and Zuzana Ambrožová will try to approach their perception of space and its formation.
But let us start with the music. Given this year focus of LVMF on American music and given our love of minimalist music that was born in America, have a look at what the minimalist movement in music actually is and why it is interesting to consider when thinking about space.
Minimalism was born in the USA in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It follows the work of Jean Sibelius and the protagonists are John Milton Cage, Michael Nyman, Tom Johnson, Steve Reich and Philip Glass. We are neither music critics nor theorists, so we will borrow a definition of minimalism in music from Richard E. Roddy: “Minimalist music is based on the repetition of slowly changing common chords in steady rhythms, often overlapping the lyrical melody in long, arching phrases… It uses repetitive melodic patterns, consonant harmonies, motoric rhythms and a deliberate pursuit of aural beauty.”
Thinking about the music, the continuity of the notes, their repetition or the separation of sections brings interesting moments into thinking about the space that we all co-create together, that we use more than the music. Although it evokes emotions in us just like the music, we know very little about it and often leave it hostile. We don’t even have many names to describe the space as we have borrowed them from music for centuries.
If minimalism is interested in repetition, OSTINATO, then repetition is absolutely crucial to spatial beauty. It is not the primitive repetition of a single tone that we see so often in contemporary architecture, but the repetition of an entire phrase and its development.
Let us try to explain this with the specific example of the square in Telč. What is crucial for this space is its tightness. The space is continuous, the sides of the square and their facades are based on the repetition of slowly changing decorative gables with window axes in steady rhythms with long, arched phrases of arcades… Each house is actually very similar to the next. Yet they differ slightly. And it’s the degree of sameness and difference that is a very compelling aspect of urban design. But what has always been important is the tightness of the space of the street, the square, or the garden. Streets were places to live and meet, squares were places of festivals, markets and large gatherings.
We have easily moved from music to space surely you perceive the friendliness of space, its function, its purpose, its definition, its psychological effect and many other aspects which are probably the basis of our perception and what we have been able to get used to recently. Contemporary architecture, and especially urbanism, no longer builds houses on top of each other and does not compose space between them. We have changed the way we think and instead of creating an urban interior we build buildings without continuity and often without repeating the basic riff. One cannot work without the other.
We can notice uniform settlements, but these structures do not compose the space. They do not look for the best way to live in and use the space, but deal with people and human community only in terms of sunlight and efficient mass transit. Moreover, for these structures, ostinato is replaced by the dull rhythm of the same one tone over and over again – monotony.
The times have changed, but the continuity of the new neighbourhoods does not exist. We have changed the aesthetics of buildings in response to monotonous neighbourhoods, but the houses that make up cities do not relate to each other. They become objects that are extremely individualized and different at all costs, but they lose their repetition. Urbanism does not give people the ability to identify with a place.
People mostly encounter architecture when creating their own interior of an apartment, a house or a garden. But what also matters is how welcoming and close the space is in public areas. Let’s reflect together on where and why it is good to live. About how to live here on earth the best.
Authors: doc. Ing. Zuzana Ambrožová, Ph.D., & MgA. Přemysl Kokeš (Kokes’Ambro)
Lecture Preview: 14 October 2025 | 5:00 PM | Závodný Gallery