It is with pride that Ondřej Chybík reveals he has no driver’s license, and his partner, Michal Krištof, has only recently obtained one. The architects are cofounders of the Czech Republic–based Chybík+Krištof, a 2019 Record Design Vanguard firm, and, Chybík explains, they find that experiencing as many aspects of a city as possible, even (or especially) poor public transportation infrastructure, is essential to their practice. Born in Brno, the country’s second-largest city, both of them were well acquainted with Zvonařka Central Bus Terminal, which makes more than 820 regional, national, and international connections and serves approximately 17,000 passengers each day. In spite of its central location and critical role in the city’s infrastructure, the Brno municipality lost control of the terminal when it was privatized in the 1990s, and it subsequently fell into disrepair. “Zvonařka seemed a dark, unfriendly place,” says the city’s mayor, Markéta Vaňková. A frequent bus rider, Chybík agrees: “It was really the worst place in the city.”
Chybík and Krištof see themselves as activist architects, with a history of seeking out projects that will have social impact. They set out to learn what it would take to rehabilitate the 1980s terminal, a steel column and space frame structure, encircled by a parapet of reinforced precast concrete, designed by architect Radúz Russ. The private entity that rented the terminal’s platforms to bus providers, it turned out, did not make enough money to maintain or renovate the building, but, during a nearly five-year advocacy process, the architects helped secure public funding to finance the terminal’s rehabilitation before taking on the project as designers in 2018.
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