Based in the Czech city of Brno, with offices in Prague and Bratislava, Chybik+Kristof has grown quickly since its early days. The 50-person firm was officially established eight years ago. But its founding partners, Ond˘rej Chybík and Michal Krištof, point out that their origin story, like so many firms’ stories, began earlier, in 2010: “We just set up the studio in a bar,” says Chybík. The two met as students while attending that year’s Venice Biennale and later joined forces on an architecture competition. “We didn’t win, but it was nice to hear opinions from a totally different angle,” says Chybík. The duo did win another competition, for an apartment building next to the Danube River in Bratislava, Slovakia, which led them to put aside ideas of joining larger firms to start their own architecture and urban-design practice just months after graduating.
Today, the office is taking part in—and setting standards for—a new era of Czech architecture. “We really want to show the world what’s happening here, because it’s not so well known,” says Chybík. After the Velvet Revolution in 1989 and the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1991, architecture students were still being trained in the popular functionalist style of Czechoslovakia’s interwar era; Chybík and Krištof see their peers and themselves as the first generation emerging from almost a century of “white boxes” to show clients a new approach. They are a “European generation,” says Krištof, whereas their teachers were closed off from the influence of other countries and international media.
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