While reading the philosophical novel "Flock without Birds - A Story" by Filip Doušek, I came across

a passage where the main character reads a fictional scientific publication about the Church of St. Nicholas

in Prague.

 

Collective of authors - Houses, faces of the time. Guide to Symbols in Architecture, 2003. Volume 4: Office

and Institutions, pp. 136–138.

Church of St. Nicholas Church on Old Town Square in Prague was built at the height of the Baroque period between 1732 and 1737.

…

The symbolism of St. Nicholas stands out particularly clearly in the light of history. In the foundations

of the Baroque building lay the ruins of a Gothic Benedictine church, which was in turn built on the site

of a Romanesque shrine from the 11th century. These three consecutive buildings share not only place

and function but, shaped by a single faith since the third century almost unchanged, also a similar ground

plan and architectural symbols. The intersection of the three in time following shrines can thus be considered

a separate abstract building. It is stronger than the stone churches (it already outlived the two previous)

and each symbol has a precise place in it.

 

The term "abstract building" immediately caught my attention and I wanted to represent it somehow.

I began to combine models of various buildings. From the beginning, I worked with architecture as a symbol

of a certain group (culture, religion, state), and often too explicitly tried to depict various wars and conflicts, whether historical (eg. the war in Yugoslavia, WWII (16 models)) or current (Ukrainian conflict, cultural conflicts related to the migration crisis). At the end of my two-year research and dead-end efforts,

I returned to the initial simple idea and created a model of three temples - Notre-Damme Cathedral

in Amiens, the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, and the New Synagogue in Pilsen. For the purpose of the semestral work, I converted the resulting model into the real world form using 3D printing and placed it in space together with a video installation of physically impossible flybys through the model.