PERFORM — give opera a civic machine

Start with a building asked to make culture monumental without completely sealing it away. Janáček Theatre emerged from decades of attempts to give Brno a modern opera house and was finally realised in the first half of the 1960s. TIC Brno places it at a turning point between late monumental socialist architecture and the more international visual language that followed Expo 58. Stand back and look at the contrast: the building has the weight and scale of a civic monument, but its public edges open through broad areas of glass. The assignment was not simply 'build a theatre'. It was to make opera look like a major public institution in a changing architectural climate.