Dox, Praha, 16.4. – 27.9.2010

Text: György Szegő

Jan Kaplický (1937–2009), the Czech-born manager of Future System, designer, fashion and jewelry designer, an outstanding and emblematic figure of contemporary architecture working in London was awarded the Stirling Prize in 1999, the World Architecture Award in 2001 and RIBA in 2004. After the events taking place in Prague in the spring of 1968 he emigrated and started to work with Foster architects’ team, cooperated in designing the Pompidou Center with Piano & Rogers, and in 2000 founded Future System with David Nixon which came to be the single British partner architects of NASA. Amanda Levete joined their office and married Kaplický in 1991. When a large number of his buildings remained in blueprint, Kaplický found comfort in his career as a fashion and jewelry designer with a body-art character. Blob which he planned for Trafalgar Square in 1985 with a pioneering design had never been built either, but it triggered a radical change in the conventional British architectural taste. In the year of the Chernobyl disaster he designed Shelter, the shade for the shelter for 200 people, the designed space station named Moon basis and the NASA control counter. He did not live to see the opening, and he almost missed the birth of his daughter last January: as a tragic dramaturgical turn of fate he died on the very same day, at the age of 72.