Editor’s Letter

Awe, ela­tion and rap­ture. These are all short-lived expe­ri­ences. They only last for a moment but they will make your pulse race for weeks. These stim­uli invig­o­rate you and take your mind off real­i­ty. In the sec­ond issue of Spa­cial mag­a­zine, pow­ered by Lasvit, we explore var­i­ous aspects of the Mar­vel theme. What do peo­ple get excit­ed about? What can trans­port them into dif­fer­ent realms? What arous­es their curios­i­ty and moti­vates them? How do they over­come the seem­ing­ly impossible?

We found inspi­ra­tion in the short sto­ry “Chil­dren on the Road” by Prague-born writer Franz Kaf­ka, one of the world’s great thinkers. This work is per­me­at­ed by a dreamy fas­ci­na­tion with nature, an unre­strained explo­ration of the world and with move­ment. Kaf­ka is dis­cov­er­ing the lim­it­less pos­si­bil­i­ties of expres­sion and joy here, which grad­u­al­ly dis­ap­peared from his lat­er work. The intro­duc­to­ry essay was writ­ten by one of the lead­ing experts on Kafka’s work, the writer Mag­dale­na Plat­zová. The arti­cle offers many imag­i­na­tive lay­ers and end­less explo­ration of the map of the world, as well as the uni­verse, and presents the lat­est col­lec­tion by David Rockwell’s stu­dio in the lead­ing role. Called Con­stel­la­tion, it is rem­i­nis­cent of the Milky Way.

In our Ques­tion­naire, we asked mem­bers of the large Lasvit fam­i­ly what they have been excit­ed about late­ly. It turns out that by being moved, we often expe­ri­ence some­thing so great that it over­whelms us. We talked to the cur­rent issue’s per­son­al­i­ty, lead­ing archi­tect, design vision­ary and nature lover Ken­go Kuma, about the trans­for­ma­tion of mon­u­men­tal­i­ty. As a young boy, he was fas­ci­nat­ed by Ken­zō Tange’s stadium. 

See­ing the way Tange man­aged to con­nect heav­en to earth in a dra­mat­ic ges­ture of hang­ing roofs enthralled him so much that he decid­ed to become an archi­tect at that very moment. The sense of mon­u­men­tal­i­ty in his own work, how­ev­er, is fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent. Instead of grandeur, he achieves it by using nat­ur­al mate­ri­als and struc­tures, rely­ing on crafts­man­ship skills and long-for­got­ten tech­niques, which he com­bines inno­v­a­tive­ly with new technologies.

At Lasvit, we also believe that it is not so much the size that mat­ters as the emo­tions you cre­ate and the inno­va­tions you man­age to imple­ment. For an overview of our com­plet­ed projects, whether large or small, sta­t­ic or inter­ac­tive, com­plex or sim­ple, see Some­thing Mes­mer­iz­ing. We dis­cuss inno­va­tions in the arti­cle The Unex­pect­ed Sym­boll-ism of Funghi, the process relat­ed to each of them in the arti­cle Turn­ing Dreams into Real­i­ty, and the spe­cif­ic result – a very com­plex light instal­la­tion that responds to music – in our arti­cle Oasis of Light and Sound.

Enthu­si­asm and excite­ment are emo­tions that we nev­er tire of. We hope you will also expe­ri­ence them when read­ing the sec­ond issue of Spa­cial magazine.