Martina Hrabová

Between Ideal and Ideology: the Parallel Worlds of František Sammer

Architect František Sammer is remembered in Czech history primarily for his postwar socialist realist architecture and as the author of an urban plan for the City of Plzeň. A closer look at the work he did between the two World Wars, however, yields surprising results. This article draws on previously unknown materials relating to Sammer’s work abroad in the 1930s and 1940s. Based on newly discovered sources and primarily on Sammer’s unpublished correspondence, it provides a unique insight into the complicated situation within the Soviet Union in the 1930s and into the community of spiritual leader Sri Aurobindo in Ponducherry in southern India. It places these ideological and social systems into the wider context of international avant-garde architecture. Sammer acquired the principles that he would apply in his professional work during the two years he spent in the studio of Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret in Paris. From there he set out for the Soviet Union, Japan, and India to apply his architectural principles in practice. He worked in the studios of artists such as Nikolai Kolli, the Vesnin brothers, Moisei Ginzburg, and Antonín Raymond, and was friends with figures such as Charlotte Pérriand, Junzō Sakakura, Jane West, William Holford, and Gordon Stephenson. The article shows that in the Soviet Union František Sammer fought to preserve the principles of avant-garde architecture, and that he later played an important role in the spread of modern architecture throughout India. The article also highlights the conceptual continuity that can be observed in Sammer’s work from before and after World War II, thus refuting the previously held belief that after the war the architect uncritically pursued personal success in the service of the totalitarian regime.

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