CHYBIK+KRISTOF's Ondřej Chybík on layering and 'crafting character' in architecture

The discussion around multiculturalism in the UK and several other immigrant-attracting nations, primarily in the global West, seems to trudge along increasingly divisive directions. While for the fiercely Right-leaning, it is the very end of civil society, an urban experiment gone wrong, and all but a farce, the proverbial Left still dabbles in the doubt and delicate joy of urban diversity. It is, for all intents and purposes, a sociological restructuring that has an immense and almost immediate effect on cities and architecture. The ways multiculturalism can manifest in architecture, especially in cities that seemingly affront this multiculturalism with a global fervour such as London—the newest home of Czech origin architectural practice CHYBIK+KRISTOF following Brno, Prague and Bratislava—is an interesting phenomenon that pits together the city’s age and aspiration. It is a charged collusion that goes well beyond simply a juxtaposition of the old and the new; there is space for political jostling, drama, tradition, radicality, opportunity, and well, space itself. My conversation with one-half of the CHYBIK+KRISTOF duo, Ondřej Chybík, began on a similar note, exploring what drove them to expand their bases away from home ground, more than aspiration and economics.

"Architects play a vital role in the stewardship of our cities and have a duty to respond to the problems of our generation. In light of the climate crisis, for example, it’s more important than ever that we look to innovative practices like adaptive reuse. London is a place that’s full of opportunity, benefitting from such a rich and varied built environment that must not only be preserved but celebrated too,” states Chybík in a conversation separate from the actual interview, spilling over onto the textual medium, probing the genealogy of the term ‘architectural response’ in a remarkably different setting plagued with a different set of challenges. “We see huge potential in Britain’s historic buildings to be creatively reimagined, from M&S Oxford St. to the Museum of London—adapted with sustainability and longevity top of mind. As a practice, our core mission is to fuel positive change in our cities on a global scale, so London is the perfect place to realise these ambitions," he comments, on the soundness of CHYBOK+KRISTOF’s expansion to the British capital.

Roughly a month after a successful 'launch' event in the form of London Landing at the Barbican Centre's conservatory, the interview—much more conversational than I initially envisaged—was set at the practice’s new studio housed in a repurposed industrial structure towards northern London, right next to a beautiful travail of the Regent’s Canal. It was exactly the kind of structure one would expect CHYBIK+KRISTOF to set up shop in, bearing an echoing resonance to some of their best works in the field of adaptive reuse. The Mendel’s Greenhouse and Zvonarka Bus Terminal projects, both located in the Czech Republic, come to mind, with an anchor firmly placed in industrial heritage. In that sense, both London and several other cities in the Czech Republic—especially owing to the country’s Communist history until 1990—lend immense opportunities for a hybrid architecture that CHYBIK+KRISTOF profess, although the latter has found it increasingly difficult to move past traditionalism in its conservation and subsequent treatment of its heritage. A desire to experiment more freely and break away from the somewhat stifling conservatism of Czech architecture further prompted the move to London, where the duo hope to leverage ‘multiculturalism’ in equivalence with an architecture that can meet the most current challenges.

Chybik continued, referring to multiculturalism with distinctly culinary qualities. Describing it to be the very “flavour of experimentation in architecture”, he professed to build for the many in a manner near proletarianised, equating inclusivity to contemporaneity, impressively proclaiming how cities like London were not represented by a majority, but by many smaller minorities. By extension, an architecture with a distinct sense of place, and aesthetic, and being responsive to the needs of these multiple “minorities” as well as a myriad lot of other challenges—being by no means a one-glove-fits-all-solution—could be enlisted as effective, memorable, or simply even functional. Each of these terms does reserve a higher distinction. For Chybik, these were “ingredients” in what became the heart of the rest of the conversation—an everlasting pursuit for the architect duo, now materialised in the form of a book by Adrian Madlener called Crafting Character. How one defines character in architecture and how it is inculcated in what is to come is a didactic question, no doubt, with no singular or even well-defined answers, but a noble pursuit in our urban and global condition nonetheless.

Through several peripheral subjects including form, context, materials, responsiveness, resource-intensiveness and urban as well as personal identity among others, the idea of ‘character’ in architecture is continually codified and decoded in successive instances. Embodied by the practice’s work and its theorisation and proliferation in the book and other media, often occurring in a cyclical manner, crafting character is both the driving force as well as the next challenge. Perhaps the closest then to a condition that could best define character arrived at through the course of the interview, was through layers and juxtaposition. Layers of contemporaneity over patinated history, of modern over medieval, brutal over industrial, of purpose over iconic, could all point to an architecture that boasted character, that boasted soundness of intent and a reverence for the past while choosing the most sustainable ways to build over it.

Watch the full interview by clicking on the cover video.