Road Trip to the Unfamiliar and Forgotten

May 27, 2025

Today’s Field Report is going to be a little different. Yesterday I went on a miniature road trip with Dušan from FOR MAAT as a way to get out from the ‘oppressive’ shadow of the castle (a righteous history but… I am more interested in the stories that get left behind and might otherwise be considered unworthy of consideration).

So, let’s go old school and make a slide show of my road trip (apologies to the city’s mayor…).

I asked Dušan to take me as far away from Trenčín as possible but still being within eye sight of the old railway bridge… So we headed to the village of Hrabovka.

Look closely, and you’ll see the new railway bridge, those rounded arches, aaaaaand just behind that in a few pixels is the old bridge. Almost not there.

Just off to the side of the valley is this green pasture, Dušan called it either the site of “wild horses” or “white horses” — I couldn’t quite catch what he said, but all you really need to know is that on this hillside is where the mafia bosses of the 90s buried their enemies: wild (white) horses.

Usually the most tranquil places hide the dirtiest secrets.

To somewhat literally cleanse ourselves of mafia history, we stopped at this natural spring and took a slurp of the surprisingly bubbly water.

Head into the dark hole and you’re greeted by a Saint and tiny water spigot.

Next up, I was curious about forgotten — or, rather, contentious — architectural history, so we visited an elementary school, a place in the Socialist era (and still today) for “professional” or “artificial” families: an orphanage. Later, I learned from the Trenčín city historian, Tomáš, that this building complex is either loved or hated . I have a feeling most, however, would prefer to let it slip into unconsciousness, a strange anomaly best forgotten.

It is quite a lovely complex of these small units dotted about a meadow, dense with trees and a human, almost childlike scale. Thumbs up.

While this sunken 'living room' could use some attention, I appreciated these ceramic panels on each of the small dormitory houses: a fox, bear, rabbit, turtle, etc., and other animals all marking the 'address' of each building.

Trenčín is known for its thousand-year old castle, but on the other side of the river, there’s this castle of modern capital: the grain silo.

The architect Le Corbusier loved the architectural form of the grain silo. In fact, he, and other modernists, created a vocabulary of forms that were explicitly lifted from North American utilitarian structures.

On our drive, I spotted this amazing building, which is now a Home Depot-like shop for renovation and building supplies, but I cannot help but think of my own “silo dreams,” such as Erich Mendelsohn had in 1924.

I don’t know what era this building is from, but it certainly is a prime example of Czechoslovakian Functionalism, inspired by the designs of Albert Kahn (I think).

So we have the old railway bridge, the new railway bridge, the car or road bridge and then this, the other car or road bridge. It’s distinguishing factor is that it’s newer. I’d really like to convene a committee and come up with names for the bridges.

So far, I have spent more time on coming up with committee names than I have on bridge names, but then that’s bureaucracy:

The Civic Guild of Transitional Topographic Labelling

Institute for the Enhancement of Unremarkable Crossings

The Centre for Applied Naming and Affective Infrastructure (CAN-AI)

The Permanent Task Force for the Ephemeral Naming of Bridges

The Bridge Identity and Semantic Harmony Bureau

The Provisional Assembly for the Memorialisation of Overpasses

The Permanent Task Force for the Ephemeral Naming of Bridges... or something else?

On my first day in Trenčín, the river Váh was quite high. The next day, its riverbed was exposed, muddy and murky with a family of swans camping out. I thought I was being gaslit somehow, as we are not anywhere near coastal tidal shifts. But then I learned that there are a series of sluices and dams controlling the river, as it is susceptible to flooding (which is also why the city architect was reluctant to allow me to build viewing platforms on certain parts of the riverbank, as that area is prone to flooding).

Dams, of course, have a long history as symbols of modernity and national pride. Infrastructure reshapes the landscape and identity, monuments to human ingenuity and displacers of history and ecologies.

We stopped at the roastery of (where else: Coffee Sheep), and there Juraj, the owner, and I both agreed that these would make fantastic apartments:

Duśan translated this dam complex as “vodne dielo:” in English, “water art.” Perfect.

Finally, we ended at the former factory site of Merina , a textile and fabric company from the Socialist era that is now sadly quite destroyed, left to rot and decay beyond any repair, preferably left not even as a reminder of a different era, but a blank spot to be erased.

With vision, this is a huge complex that could easily be renovated into a vital district of life, culture, industry.

I hope you enjoyed this tour of the familiar and unhidden, a small intervention into the other histories that lay latent within our urban fabric.