Where are you from?
From Považská Bystrica.

Where did you study?
Primary and secondary school there, then at the Faculty of Architecture of STU in Bratislava.

Who was your best teacher?
Adam Gebrian and Michal Kuzemenský, who never taught me, but both wrote blogs that covered topics that were of interest to me at the time within architecture and that were more relevant to me than most of what I was getting at our faculty.

Who were/ are your parents?
They are both doctors, still working.

What don’t you enjoy in design?
I don’t enjoy design in architecture.

And on the contrary, what do you?
I enjoy thinking about what constitutes the public interest in the situations I get into, and how I can help that turn out well. In the last couple of years, design has only been a small part of my work, the rest being some form of engagement with competitions, managing a studio and formulating arguments for various officials, MPs, mayors, chairmen, presidents, deans and rectors to persuade them to vote for paths that I think lead to good architecture or environments.

What do you listen to?
Lately Mastodon, ČAD, Bowie, Owen Pallet, Francois de Roubaix, Agnes Obel and a cadre of others, I’ve been on quite a roll. I listen to various radio music shows more than specific artists, I like the influx of new stuff.

Your favourite film, cartoon, series?
The Dark knight, One Punch Man, Battlestar Galactica.

Who do you respect as an authority in and out of your field?
I recognize anyone who I can think, because of some expression of theirs, that they understand what they are doing and are trying to be helpful. Outside of architecture – lately I am always very pleased when I come across someone who could (for lack of a better term) be described as a conservative intellectual – I am currently enjoying following the psychiatrist Michal Patarák on Facebook, for example, and his clashes with the sociologist Pavel Hardoš about value issues are particularly amusing.

What thing did you last buy?
A chair.

Do you buy professional literature? What was the latest book?
Yes, but lately less and less, in my field. I’ve sort of become more familiar with it in the last few years. Last time I bought and read Reflections of Architecture 9,10,11,12/2017 – it’s a collection of transcripts of lectures by leading Czech architects and comments on them by students. It was done last year during the winter semester, it was quite nice. I really enjoyed every single disagreement, revelation of exaggerated ego or superficiality, inconsistency that those students saw there. I guess there is some hope for the future.

Do you vote?
Yes, always, every single time. To do that, I phone my family and ask them to go too.

Who throws the best parties?
We do.

Your favourite dome?
The gas chamber in the former Suvilahti power plant in Helsinki, my friends and I sang “Pokapala na salaši slanina” in four voices in it, I still get chills when I think of the sacred feeling of the space.

Party dress. Made by…?
I don’t go to parties.

Your hero from the past?
Umberto Eco – an intellectual who commented on everything important that society was currently living through and yet didn’t consider it inferior to devote his time to something as bizarre and beautiful as writing The Island of the Day Before.

Best/nicest house?
Something first-republican, though.

Do you have any stereotypes when you work? How do they show?
I guess so, but by the fact that in our studio we do most things as a team and don’t really address any authorial handwriting, I think it’s suppressed.

What’s on your desktop?
A photo of a forest I took in Dunajské luhy.

Best exhibition, work of art?
Fear of the Unknown – an exhibition that was at the Kunsthalle in Bratislava two years ago. I went to see it 4 or 5 times.

What do you respect both from the local and foreign design scene? And why?
The ability to create “nice architecture” and to have reasonable opinions – that’s probably such a basic thing (although actually in reality it’s an exceptional thing), but in reality it really inspires respect in me only when those architects add something extra to it – that they go to teach, they get involved in the Slovak Chamber of Architects, they do education, they go to the building commission in some local government, and so on.

Extraordinary book?
I try to read at a pace of 1 book a week (although I’ve been failing a bit lately) … for the past two years, I remember Seveneves by Neal Stephenson as an exceptional event. At the time I read it, it annoyed me in places with its literary style, but in retrospect I think it’s a very special work In the very first sentence you learn that the moon has exploded and ***SPOILER*** a few dozen pages later that life on earth will soon end as a result. The moon thing is, of course, a hypothetical situation, but what follows captures that kind of heavy feeling of something’s not right, something’s gone wrong, the whole thing is slowly coming to an end and we have to figure out what to do about it now.

Optimist, pessimist, nihilist?
I’m sure it will get better (not bad now either).

Do you have any hobby?
I used to climb quite a bit. Right now I’m waiting for my cast to come off, otherwise I’m in the process of making a big comeback.

Ethics or money?
How much money?

Solo or in a collective?
Sport and leisure individually, work collectively.

Slovakia as the Promised Land?
Yes, I think we’re actually having a fantastic time.