Sial in Ceska Lipa

This article looks at the major works of architects from the Liberec office of Sial in Ceska Lipa from the perspective of the architectural qualities of the works and their political and social context. For a comprehensive picture, the article also notes the planning work done in Ceska Lipa by top Sial representatives in the 1950s, that is, before Hubacek's famous studio was founded in 1968. In the complicated times of the 1950s, art was in the grip of Socialist Realism. Jaromir Vacek's work in Ceska Lipa consistently acknowledged this style. Ceska Lipa took relatively little advantage of the more politically relaxed 1960s. One of the more progressively designed structures was Jiff Svoboda's concept for a self-service market, which ultimately the city never went on to build. The article devotes special attention to the period between the 1960s and the 1980s. It was during this time that the uranium industry took off in Ceska Lipa and in the entire surrounding region. During this golden age there was a substantial increase in capital construction in the city, especially of residential panel buildings erected to house the influx of workers in the uranium mines. The dynamic pace at which the city began to flourish luckily did not lead to the destructive demolition of the city's historically developed areas. The new face of a uranium-industry Ceska Lipa was partly shaped by the high-quality public buildings designed by the members of Sial studio (e.g. Sever primary school by Zdenek Zavrel and Dalibor Vokac; the building of the District Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia by Otakar Binar; the Uran shopping centre by Emil Prikryl; and the Crystal cultural centre by Jiff Suchomel). Prikryl's shopping centre (1980-1983) thoughtfully combines elements of the contemporary European architectural styles of Neofunctionalism and Post-modernism. The high quality of Prikryl's shopping centre has already been noted by Jan Sapak, Rostislav Svacha and Petr Kratochvil. In his project for the cultural centre (1974-1990) Jiff Suchomel made pioneering use of solar energy, which was still an uncommon heating method at that time. Although these works were never accepted by the city's population, they rank among the most valuable monuments of Czechoslovak architectural work under the communist regime.