ABSTRACT
Examining closely two buildings in Česká Lípa designed by Emil Přikryl and Jiří Suchomel, this chapter proposes that within the context of normalized Czechoslovakia and as a response to the real impossibility for sustained cultural exchange across the Iron Curtain in this period, SIAL Školka architects conceived of their work in imaginary conversation with architecture outside of Czechoslovakia, transforming thus the meaning and the function of those tropes. These architects’ eagerness to develop a variant of the postmodern language in architecture, perhaps just as much as the general embrace of postmodernist theory by the intellectual elites of Eastern Europe corresponded to vastly different needs than those of their Western counterparts, though it also allowed for a form of global exchange at a time when it could only function as the game of broken telephones. Still, understanding the relation between the First World and Second World discourse through a lens of adaptation and conversation, rather than the common narrative of “uneven development,” grants vital political agency to both Second World architects and discourse.
