Join the underground!
Anežka Ondračková
Vojtěch Zajíček
Façade is a space for student work, debate, and criticism. Through our parasitic presence we display independent student work and open space for neglected themes, focusing on the student condition. Facade is a fluid collective of students founded in 2024 within the architecture faculty at BUT. Operating primarily through the medium of a self-published magazine, we aim to spread awareness about student work created outside the context of institutional requirements.
Our focus is to challenge and subvert the nature of student work under the current educational system at architecture schools, especially in our geopolitical region. Current modes of producing knowledge don’t provide space for addressing related questions, resulting in student work alienated from an individual framework or interest. It is nearly impossible to produce personal work within official academic structures. Instead, it is often exploited as workforce in school projects. Overwhelmed architecture students facing time pressure and endless need for quantity, are simply left to reproduce.
In search for an alternative, we place great importance on debate, which provides a temporary space for independent student education. Our practice is twofold. On one hand, we organize meets and events, share space for work, debate and educate each other, viewing ourselves as a non-hierarchical feminist collective. Our debate disturbs the conservative academic curriculum. When debating, some work is shared while other later emerges from it. We have taken part in projects such as curating a public exhibition of independent student artworks or realized a participatory artwork for a Brno-based annual art festival. On the other hand, we communicate our opinions to the institution with magazines present in the school and accessible for free. Our personal works are the driving force, making the magazine a political tool in the rigid environment we inhabit. One could not exist without the other.
In Façade, we are passionate about uncovering holes in the academic fabric relating to students and their experience. However, we are part of a broader educational system, which affects not only us in Brno, but also students across the Czechoslovak region. We would like to explore local intersections to better understand the nature of student work in other contexts. Our goal is to create a regional space for shared investigation and debate about collective situations. We call this network the underground, a metaphor to the narrative about students as a homogenous mass, yet also as a group that gives purpose to the school and teaching at large.
We approach the formation of the underground similarly as the formation of the Façade collective. Our aim is to start the debate at other places precisely through exploring their contexts. Façade would not present itself as a brand or a finite set of rules or information to follow, but rather as a collective network of opinions. In this network, open communication, inclusion of various initiatives and a bottom-up approach are key.
To start building connections we have decided to trace preliminary steps towards spreading knowledge about the underground and its purpose. We would dedicate a magazine issue to the topic of regional education and publish it across other architecture schools as well. Through their quiet presence in school halls, our message can reach a greater number of people, even those bearing political responsibility about the current condition. Afterwards, we would continue the debate (not only) about the topics addressed in the issue with local students, sharing our experience through communication or collective work sessions. The emerging network and toolkit for communication would directly create the research of our condition. We aspire for a sustainable collaborative environment, a framework of continuous exploration and a truly transparent student debate.
The underground is waiting for you…