Concrete Islands

September 28, 2025

Today I went looking for the Villa of Dr. Sázel even though I know it’s not there anymore. Built in 1930, the home was both the doctor’s office and family home. Its architect, František Lydie Gahura , was a Czech and this house was only one of two buildings he completed in Slovakia. Its shape is an extruded, three-story concrete box painted white that echoes some of Corbusier’s housing forms, yet there is an austerity in its simplicity that Corbusier never could have matched. There is a tiny bit of showmanship with a corner window that wraps around the second floor, with hardly any frame or mullion, like a beautiful carved chunk of glass inserted into this hard, solid surface. I would love to sit in there, gaze out the window, soaking up the view below drinking a coffee I don’t drink.

Before…

Demolished in 2005, a different house sits there. I am sure you can guess what replaced this “boring,” “ugly” and “broken” box. That’s right, an ersatz villa hidden behind the curliest of curlicue wrought iron fencing, a Real Housewives of Orange County-type special built from probably the cheapest materials possible, an example of Trenčín’s very own McMansion Hell . I am glad its backyard view is of the prison.

…after.

I don’t know much about Functionalist architecture , but Trenčín is (sort of) riddled with (former, mostly) examples of this specific style of modernism that took hold in the former Czechoslovakia during the interwar period. It’s a kind of attitude, a sparse form of building that strips away any meaningless appendages in favour of rationalism. By 1938, the Nazis marched in and branded such building as degenerate, imprisoning its greatest practitioners or forcing them into exile or killing them in the Holocaust. The post-war communist regime was no better, declaring Socialist Realism as the only acceptable style (in my eyes, that ugly McMansion is a descendent of such style, caked with heavy ornament and columns that do nothing); by the time Stalin died in 1953, Functionalism was doomed to rot, its democratic roots stripped away, tainted by its “internationalist” striving (sound familiar?). All that’s left are a few fragments here and there, most forgotten, torn down, repurposed, covered up, or taking on the cloak of cheap building materials making these spare boxes no better than the industrial waste shops and warehouses of the hinterland.

This project is not about Functionalist architecture, but the act of learning how to see. I imagined myself wandering 1930s Trenčín, conjuring into view these once significant icons of a potential future now reduced to broken memories. Trenčín, like most cities, is a city of fragments, filled with half-erased houses, re-purposed schools, bridges with competing names or even no name. Unlike Robert Smithson, my aim is not to recast such discards as monuments , but moments, traces that open up different ways of imaging the city. The Temporary Seeing Project (Úsek Dočasného Pozorovania, more on the name at a later time) is a method to gather these splinters into view, if only for a short while.

Part of this project will involve a map, where fragments become unofficial points of reference: erased houses, renamed bridges, children’s compounds, failed utopias.

Some locations:

There’s the old railway bridge, and the new railway bridge, and then the car bridge but also the new car bridge. But the old car bridge is also referred to as the yellow bridge, but then the new car bridge is also yellow. So what bridge is the yellow bridge?

Nestled in a parking lot with a few spindly pine trees to keep cover, Klara Patakiová’s 1988 commemorative monument Victory Day, 9 May 1945 lurks in the shadow of the Army Medical Centre, bounded by a sentry of Volkswagens, Škodas, and Toyotas. Patakiová’s ensemble, built in robust block-like forms, depicts four figures — two men, two women — holding up a heavy draped banner as their bodies, in typical socialist realist fashion, heave forward in unison. Originally commissioned for the House of the Army (Dom armády, ODA) in the city centre, the sculpture once squatted prominently at its forecourt. Inevitably, Patakiová’s banner-wielding foursome were dislodged from ODA’s formal entrance plaza and marooned, living its own strange half-life like a character in a J.G. Ballard novel ; a concrete island of memory surrounded by exhaust fumes, just another player in the afterlife of socialist-era works.

Children’s town. Home for professional families. A place for artificial families. A fox, a bear, a squirrel and a mouse. The lawns are thick with grass that could use a little trimming. Square-like buildings squat this compound, with the tiny voices of children reverberating off their bricks and concrete. A girl sits in a lawn chair outside one of the residences decked out in pink bunny slippers. She holds the hand of a little boy, not more than seven years old, his front teeth are missing. This facility convened experts in pedagogy, sociology, and psychology in collaboration with architects to design a new form of social housing for orphans.

Sihot — not to be confused with the Polish town of Sopot on the coast of the Baltic, where Boney M was introduced to puzzled, and, eventually, adoring, fans during the height of the Disco craze in the 1970s — is a district extending out from the outer extremities of Mierové, countering the jumbled, crumbled blocks of that central square with clean, sharp, functionalist lines. It is one of Slovakia’s greatest modern urban achievements. Small, squat blocks painted in bright colours: think peach, candy floss blues and light greens, these buildings march in rectangular arrangement. Perhaps the greatest example of the architecture of Sihot is the Dr. Milan Hodza Business Academy, designed by the Jewish architect Ferdinand Silberstein (changing his name to Silvan, in 1945). A heap of rectangles elegantly piled around each other, the facade’s brilliant white is punctured here-and-there by stripes of vidid red, reminiscent of a candy cane. Silberstein — Silvan — decamped to Australia in 1948, where he mostly designed power plants. He would never again design a building in Slovakia. Much of his extended family was killed in the Holocaust.