Alexander Bala
University of Texas at Austin, USA
On January 16th, 1969, Jan Palach, a twenty-year old history student at Charles University in Prague, set himself ablaze on Wenceslas Square in the center of the Czechoslovak capital. Palach’s act of self-immolation was in protest of what he described as a general feeling of “demoralization” that had pacified the country as a result of the Warsaw Pact occupation that began the previous year. The publicity of Palach’s funeral procession through the Old Town, an event that thousands of Prague residents attended, and, particularly, the mourning of his mother, inspired poet David Shapiro to write “The Funeral of Jan Palach” (pub. 1971). In turn, Shapiro’s poem would go on to inspire architect John Hejduk to design a memorial for Jan Palach: the House of the Suicide and the House of the Mother of the Suicide (1986). The memorial, together with a plaque bearing an inscription of “The Funeral of Jan Palach,” were permanently installed in 2016 on Jan Palach Square, next to the Prague Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design (UMPRUM).
As narrated in Shapiro’s poem, Palach, observing his own funeral procession from the vantage of his departed spirit or anima, hears his mother crying out and starts to follow her from above as she walks together with the gathered mass of people through the Old Town. Hejduk architecturally translated this moment through the perforations on the tops of the “slivers” on the House of the Mother of the Suicide that filter light into the space. In both examples, Palach’s mother draws her son’s anima back down to earth. The civic context in which that anima landed meant that it could realize, albeit indirectly, according to Shapiro and Hejduk’s interpretations of Palach’s funeral procession, the highest form of what the German philosopher Hannah Arendt describes in her book, The Human Condition (1958), as the vita activa (active life)⎯namely, “action” as the process by which individuals disclose to one another their “unique distinctness” or true selves. The disclosure of Palach’s anima through the publicly visible mourning of his mother, a form of action that substituted for his self-disclosure, allowed for his death to acquire a broader political significance.
In this paper, I examine the transition of the anima to the vita activa as embodied in the character of the mother in Hejduk’s design: Libuše Palachová as the House of the Mother of the Suicide. I specifically analyze the architectural figuration of this transition, in which the perforations on the tops of the slivers metaphorically render the impression of Palach’s anima as light. This aesthetic effect, perceptible to a social body that can gather inside the House, parallels Palachová’s role in Shapiro’s poem, in which Palach articulates: “When I had a voice you could call a voice / My mother wept to me: / My son, my beloved son / I never thought this possible.” Both Shapiro and Hejduk’s interpretations of Palach’s funeral procession imagine Palachová as making her son’s anima, not only intelligible, but also accessible to a collective audience, for which Palach has “a voice you could call a voice.”
Session Three – Shadow
3:30-3:45 PM
Friday, March 28, 2025
Alexander Bala is a PhD candidate in Architectural History at the University of Texas at Austin and current American Councils Title VIII Research Fellow in Warsaw, Poland. He holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Virginia Tech and Master of Arts in Architectural History from UT Austin. Bala was a Fulbright Research Fellow in Warsaw (2018/2019) and a Visegrád Research Fellow in Budapest, Hungary (2024). His research examines the debates that revolved around the humanization of modernist architecture at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts in the 1950s relative to their philosophical extensions within the broader intellectual context of post-war humanism.