Přístavba Jižní Čechy, HAMR's addition to a residence in South Bohemia, Czech Republic
Ales Jungmann / Courtesy Hut Architecktury Martin Rajniš Přístavba Jižní Čechy, HAMR's addition to a residence in South Bohemia, Czech Republic

Martin Rajniš is on his fourth life. With his small Prague-based firm, Hut Architecktury Martin Rajniš, the 76-year-old architect has spent the past decade constructing some of the most fantastic and the most humble structures in the Czech Republic. For a designer of Rajniš’s stature—he was a 2014 recipient of the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture alongside the likes of Christopher Alexander and Tatiana Bilbao—it is a somewhat surprising coda to a career defined by large-scale commercial and civic projects.

Martin Rajniš
Courtesy Hut Architecktury Martin Rajniš Martin Rajniš

For decades, Rajniš’s name was most closely associated with the Máj department store in Prague, a 1970s landmark of late modernism that elevated Rajniš and partners John Eisler and Miroslav Masák to the status of national architectural celebrity. In the mid-1990s, Rajniš and his colleagues worked with the likes of Jean Nouvel, Hon. FAIA, to help design a new neighborhood of modern office buildings and mixed-use shopping centers in the city—figuratively and literally scrubbing away the district’s Communist residue.

Today, Rajniš has little interest in the megaprojects that defined the first half of his career. Instead, he prefers smaller, more esoteric projects—observation towers, wooden bridges, maintenance sheds. Besides their agrarian steampunk aesthetic, what unifies Rajniš’s more recent output is the pursuit of what he calls prirozena architektura, or natural architecture. “If we seek a common speech with all people on the planet, if we want contemporary architecture to be accessible and communicable, the logical point of departure is the principles of nature,” Rajniš wrote in an eponymous eponymous monograph (Zlatý řez, 2008) of work completed between 2002 and 2008, during which he founded two Prague practices, HRA and then E-MRAK.

Rajniš’s interest in natural forms and processes derives from a desire to build structures that engender an immediate emotional reaction in people. He chafes at the idea that architecture should have to be explained and dreams of a populist architecture that everyone, no matter their age or status, can appreciate. “I want an old woman, a pensioner, to look at [a building] and say, ‘Jesus Christ, I like it!’” he tells me. “That is my dream.”

Přístavba Jižní Čechy, HAMR's addition to a residence in South Bohemia, Czech Republic
Ales Jungmann / Courtesy Hut Architecktury Martin Rajniš Přístavba Jižní Čechy, HAMR's addition to a residence in South Bohemia, Czech Republic
Přístavba Jižní Čechy includes an observatory
Ales Jungmann / Courtesy Hut Architecktury Martin Rajniš Přístavba Jižní Čechy includes an observatory

Lives One, Two, and Three

The idea of a first, second, and third life is borrowed from Buddhism. “The first life is a time of study,” Rajniš wrote in Skici—Sketches (Kant, 2016), his 160-page book of hand drawings. The second life is a time of work. The third “is a time of recognition, fulfillment, reconciliation, and enlightenment. I’m not enlightened, but I’m trying out a new model.”

Rajniš’s first life began in 1944 in Prague. His mother was educated at the Sorbonne, and his father, a trained engineer, helped inventors commercialize their products. When Rajniš was 4 years old, the Bolsheviks came to power. He watched as the majority of his family’s wealth disappeared. “It was roughly 1 to 20—20 times less money than before,” he recounted when we first spoke in 2018. The experience instilled a lifelong distrust of socialism, and of government in general. Today, Rajniš describes himself as a right-wing anarchist. “I like freedom and money,” he says.

To see more images of the work of Martin Rajniš and his firm, visit ARCHITECT's Project Gallery.

Despite his family’s losses and his own struggles with dyslexia and dysgraphia, Rajniš stayed on a promising track. Educated in Catholic-turned-Communist schools, he studied architecture at Czech Technical University, in Prague, and then the city’s Academy of Fine Arts. After graduate school, Rajniš joined SIAL, then Prague’s largest architecture and engineering firm, where he met Eisler and Masák and subsequently designed the Maj department store.

Tower Bára II
Courtesy Hut Architecktury Martin Rajniš Tower Bára II

In 1986, Rajniš left SIAL to start DA Studio, the first of several architecture firms he would found. Just six years in, the firm won a commission to help master plan Prague’s embattled Smíchov district, collaborating with Nouvel. Another architect might have leveraged this visibility to pursue ever larger projects, possibly internationally. But Rajniš says he became disillusioned with what he saw as a lack of integrity and imagination in those urban renewal projects. In 1998, he abruptly closed DA Studio and spent the next four years traveling. Thus begins his third life.

While hiking Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni—the world’s largest and highest salt flat at nearly 12,000 feet above sea level—Rajniš spotted a tuft of paja brava, or Peruvian feather grass, thriving in the inhospitable environment. He had an epiphany. “I realized that this was a model for how the magical structure we call architecture should look,” he writes in Skici—Sketches. “Modest, a little bit random, shaped into a very clear pattern, capable of weathering the worst ambient conditions, and composed of numerous substructures that influence each other but retain their own inner identity.”

Life Four and Thereafter

In 2002, Rajniš returned to Prague and began winning dozens of commissions, many of them for remote sites in far-flung places. One of his most well-known projects is a 2008 post office and gift shop atop Mt. Sněžka, the highest point in the Czech Republic. The 1,200-square-foot project takes the form of a simple wooden box with an exterior spiral staircase that leads to a rooftop observation deck. Protecting the building from the elements, including winds that can exceed 155 miles per hour, is a skin of operable wood shutters that close over double panes of 0.25-inch-thick tempered glass—an architectural equivalent of paja brava.

Andrea Thiel Lhotakova Post office and gift shop atop Mt. Sněžka, on the border between the Czech Republic and Poland

The architect’s fairy-talelike creations are almost exclusively built out of wood—often minimally processed lumber and waste materials—with structures that rely on little more than gravity and a few wires. A 2008 barn in Horní Maxov, Czech Republic, borrows the structure of a lumber stack for its exterior walls. Horizontal slats separated by wood stickers create a self-shading façade without the use of nails, screws, or glue. The only other supports are steel cables for tensile strength and baling wire to secure the roof’s dry-stacked plywood laths.

Courtesy Martin Rajnis Barn in Maxov

Rajniš took a similar approach for the Bára observation tower in a forest preserve near Chrudim. Designed as a three-sided pyramid lopped off at the top, the structure’s hollow stack consists of 16-foot larch boards and diagonal crossbeams. A spiral staircase of oak is suspended from the crossbeams and leads to the observation deck.

Tower Bára II
Courtesy Hut Architecktury Martin Rajniš Tower Bára II
Tower Bára II
Courtesy Hut Architecktury Martin Rajniš Tower Bára II

In 2015, Rajniš began to explore what he calls “anarchostructuralism,” a rebuttal to architecture’s penchant for order and premeditation. The Dome of Chaos, an experimental structure built out of rough hardwood branches and zip ties, was constructed over two days on the Czech Technical University campus in Prague in an open workshop that welcomed curious passersby to participate.

The dome served as a precursor to HAMR’s 80-foot-tall Doubravka Tower in Prague’s Kyje district. Three giant, lattice-like structures, resembling blimps turned up on their ends, encircle a circular, timber stair tower. Unlike the dome, the structures use steel U-bolts rather than zip ties to connect more than 4 miles of small-diameter acacia boles. Ultimately, Rajniš’s sculptural interventions represent a kind of minimalism—not so much a formal minimalism, but a minimalism of means—making use out of unfinished or waste materials, eschewing contractors, and embracing chaos.

Dome of Chaos
Tomáš Tesař Dome of Chaos
Dome of Chaos assembly
Tomáš Tesař Dome of Chaos assembly


Ambitions Aside

Rajniš is, in many ways, a contrarian. Architects of international fame often lead massive firms staffed by hundreds of designers. But Rajniš employs just six architects and one office manager. Most, including partners David Kubík and Tomáš Kosnar, are half Rajniš’s age.

The name, Hut Architecktury, is a deliberate reference to medieval guilds in which apprentices learned a trade firsthand from a master. Rajniš still refuses to use a computer, preferring to sketch while the other, younger architects in his office translate those sketches into digital 3D models. Despite this anachronistic workflow, Kosnar says the firm has the feel of a collective. After experiencing it, “you can hardly go to another office,” he says. “It’s almost impossible.”

Over the years, the firm has avoided large international design competitions and high-profile civic works that more ambitious architects might chase. HAMR has undertaken only two museum commissions in its eight-year existence: Gulliver, an incredible wood zeppelin-shaped event space suspended above the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague; and an obscure gallery and lighthouse dedicated to the fictional Czech polymath Jara Cimrman.

Gulliver
Petr Kralik Gulliver
Lighthouse and museum of Jára Cimrman
Courtesy Hut Architecktury Martin Rajniš Lighthouse and museum of Jára Cimrman
Lighthouse and museum of Jára Cimrman
Courtesy Hut Architecktury Martin Rajniš Lighthouse and museum of Jára Cimrman

Personally, Rajniš’s views are also contradictory. He laments architecture’s place at the fringe of popular culture and yet has himself withdrawn from many of the spaces and political processes through which architecture might find new influence. He has said that the future of architecture is female, but no female architects are in his guild. And he deplores government, though world governments remain crucial to the protection of the natural resources he admires and the regulation of greenhouse gases he abhors. In some ways, his view of architecture is as anachronistic as his workflow. In other ways, it belies a belief in the power of collectivism and the potential for a more sustainable future.

While other well-established architects wrestle with pressing societal issues, such as a lack affordable housing, Rajniš seems content to spend his fourth and final life building his works of wonderment. “His head is full of his architecture,” Kosnar says simply. “There’s no space for anything else.”

To see more images of the work by Martin Rajniš and his firm, visit ARCHITECT's Project Gallery.

Ester Tower in Jerusalem
Courtesy Martin Rajniš Ester Tower in Jerusalem
Ester Tower in Jerusalem
Courtesy Martin Rajniš Ester Tower in Jerusalem