Jaroslav Liptay
Previous decades of massive construction and reconstruction activity introduced chaos into our villages and towns. Urban agglomerations include dull blocks of flats, villages have construction blocks built without thinking and spontaneously, under the pressure of marketing campaigns. In general, construction complexes are results of bad work of those who designed them and bad work of administrative bodies, all that due to diverse reasons.
Folk construction remains source of diversity, innovations and harmony. However, traditional style construction, using elements and features of folk construction activity, may be a problem because conditions, social, technical and economic, have changed over the time and now live only in memories of older generation and archives. It is a serious fault when forms and shapes of a specific region appear outside such region. Or, it is bad when some components of a specific region are applied in a house located in a different region, or combining such components. A better way is to creative interpretation of original elements, identifying new forms that build on rural traditions. The reconstruction of Koliba Expo in Bratislava is a bad example of such activity. The building was reconstructed to become a kitsch, a construction negating pure and simple appearance of our folk constructions.