Refreshments: sacral drinks, caskets and rainbow macaroons.

Cafe robot – "sacralccino"

With the support of the children of Fatima.

We are looking forward to seeing you!

The VUTIUM Publishing House is publishing a publication by Marek Jan Štěpán. SAKRAL (1991–2021) presenting the sacral buildings of Marek Štěpán over the past thirty years. Although the architect's portfolio is much more diverse, he is perceived by the public mainly as an architect of churches. He has received a number of awards for his church buildings and reconstructions, including international ones.

The richly illustrated publication documents twelve sacral buildings and reconstructions created in the years 1991–2021. The time frame of the list is given by the church in Lesná in Brno, with which the book begins and ends. In 1991, Marek Štěpán won the competition for a spiritual and pastoral center for the Lesná housing estate with his diploma thesis, but the implementation failed at that time. It was only his second project that was implemented, according to which today's church dedicated to Blessed Mary Restituta was created.

Marek Štěpán studied the field of neo-form in the historical environment and the theory of architecture at the Faculty of Architecture of the Technical University of Prague in 1985–91. As the historian and theorist of architecture Vladimír Šlapeta mentions in the introduction to the book, he was lucky to be taken on by the teacher Jaroslav Drápal in his first years of study, who opened the way for him to reflect on spatial structures and their significance for sacral architecture. After founding his own architectural studio, Štěpán found the focus of his work precisely in an area that was losing importance in the pragmatically oriented 20th century. Marek Štěpán proves through his lifelong creative efforts that a return to sacral architecture – the construction of a church – can be the highest artistic mission.

The retrospective of Marek Štěpán’s sacral work presents, in addition to completed buildings, unrealized projects and visions, typological variations of liturgical space on a number of his own and historical examples. There are also a number of handwritten sketches that reveal to the reader the ways of architectural thinking of a creative creator in today's overly technical digital age. From this point of view, the publication is also important for the education of the next generation of architects, which Marek Štěpán is dedicated to at his alma mater.