User:Popamater/Matevž Čelik

Matevž Čelik, Slovenian architect, architectural critic, editor, researcher and cultural producer, * June 11, 1971, Kranj, Slovenia.

He lives in Maribor. After graduating from the Faculty of Architecture in Ljubljana (1998), he began working as an independent architect. Until 2003, he collaborated with the architectural office Ravnikar Potokar, where he co-authored several projects. From 2003 to 2010, he led his architectural practice. From 2010-2020 he headed the Museum of Architecture and Design (MAO) in Ljubljana. He is the founder and program director of the Future Architecture platform, a European platform for the exchange and networking between architectural institutions and new talent. He is credited with renovating BIO, the former Biennial of Industrial Design and the oldest design biennial in Europe, which he developed from a regular design exhibition into a living experiment to explore the potential of design to drive change in the future. He was a member of the Advisory Board of the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture - Mies van der Rohe Award and a member of the jury of the European Prize for Public Urban Space. Today, he is a member of the advisory board of the Archipelago project, run by HEAD and HEPIA Universities in Geneva. He considers understanding the new, hybrid roles of public cultural institutions as crucial for their future development, as well as for the development of future cultural policies.

Architectural practice
Matevž Čelik is the author of a residential building in Lesce in the Gorenjska region, which was nominated for the Plečnik Medal in 2003 and was later awarded the Luigi Cosenza Silver Plaque in Naples, an award for young European architects. In 2004 and 2005 Matevž Čelik made several projects for the renovation of public spaces in Bled (Renovation of village cores in Bled, 2004; Promenada Bled, 2005), and in 2006 he successfully participated in competitions for the extension of the Municipality of Maribor (2006) and competition for the Metaxourgeio residential neighborhood in Athens (2006).

Architectural criticism
After 2001, Matevž Čelik published several different articles on architecture and urbanism in the Saturday supplement of the newspaper Delo. In addition, Čelik publishes in domestic and foreign professional publications; among them the most important are Hiše (Ljubljana), Oris (Zagreb), Portfolyo (Istanbul), Domus (Milano) and A + U (Tokyo). In 2007, he published the monograph New architecture in Slovenia at the international publishing house Springer WienNewYork, which is the first comprehensive review of contemporary Slovenian architecture intended for international readers. In published works and texts, he defends the thesis that the quality of architecture depends on the social, economic and cultural context.

Trajekt, Institute for Spatial Culture
In 2002, Matevž Čelik launched an initiative to establish an online newspaper for architecture, urbanism and planning, and with his peers architects he founded Trajekt, the Institute for Spatial Culture, in Ljubljana. Trajekt was the first Slovenian online magazine for architecture, urbanism and spatial culture. Its purpose was to inform and illuminate everyday professional issues, to establish an independent critical, problematic and research discussion on design, social, material and other phenomena related to spatial culture. With its timeliness, the Trajekt has become a link between the professional community, the public and decision-makers at all levels, from municipalities to the state parliament. The journal contributed to a broader understanding of democratic principles and transparent processes in spatial planning. In 2004, the Trajekt Institute received the Plečnik Medal for its contribution to architectural culture.

Museum of Architecture and Design (MAO)
In 2010, the Minister of Culture, Majda Širca, appointed Matevž Čelik to become director of the newly established Museum of Architecture and Design in Ljubljana. In ten years of directing, Čelik has carried out a thoughtful reform of the institution from a small city museum to a leading national institution with international reach. He introduced a new program in the museum with fresh, innovative formats intended for the preservation of Slovenian heritage and support for promising young artists and creative companies. Founded in 1972, one of the oldest museums of architecture and design in Europe, it has established itself as a national and European center for the transfer of knowledge in the field of heritage and creativity. Today, MAO is considered an example of the transformation of the museum into a dynamic, modern institution with new functions.

He opened a new program at MAO in 2011 with the Open Depots exhibition, where he used to show in full the heritage that MAO keeps in its collections and which had been stored in depots until then. In the following years, Čelik set up a program of exhibitions that led to the gradual processing of collections and systematic presentations of the most important authors and works: Niko Kralj, Unknown Known Designer (2012), Direction B, Design Reform (2013), Under a Common Roof: Modern Public Buildings from the collection of MAO and other archives (2013), BIO 50: biennial of (industrial) design through fifty years (2014), Marko Turk: Homo faber (2015), Plans, traps and alternatives: 120 years of modern urbanism in Ljubljana (2015) Century of a poster. Poster of the 20th century in Slovenia (2015), Saša J. Mächtig: systems, structures, strategies (2016), Neighborhoods and streets: Vladimir Braco Mušič and great architecture (2016), Stanko Kristl, architect. Humanity and space (2018), We are renovating !!! architectural renovation (2019).

In 2010, the MAO, with six partners from the territory of Yugoslavia, launched the project, titled Unfinished Modernization, between utopia and pragmatism. The project brought together more than 50 young researchers and historians of architecture to research and present the architecture of socialist Yugoslavia. In 2012, Čelik participated in a large closing exhibition as part of the European Capital of Culture Maribor program, which for the first time comprehensively presented the history of architecture in Yugoslavia from the Second World War to its collapse. Based on the Unfinished Modernization project, MoMA in 2014 began preparing an exhibition on Yugoslav architecture and, among other things, invited steel to participate in the regional curatorial advisory committee, which directed curators Martino Stierli and Vladimir Kulić in preparing the exhibition Towards a Concrete Utopia, Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980. At the exhibition, which opened in July 2018 and triggered a major international response, MAO, with more than 60 exhibits, was the main lender of the exhibition.

Today, thanks to Čelik, MAO boasts an organized collection of 80,000 objects in the field of architecture, design and photography, an innovative permanent installation of the collection, a café, a shop and a renovated courtyard.

At the end of his second term, Minister Vasko Simoniti replaced Matevž Čelik in a series of politically motivated replacements with which the Slovene Democratic Party seeks to direct the Slovene cultural space in accordance with its ideology. He appointed a more conservative and domestic research oriented dr. Bogo Zupančič.

Biennial of Design (BIO)
As the director of MAO, Matevž Čelik renovated and repositioned the Ljubljana Biennial of Design (BIO), the former Biennial of Industrial Design. He opened it to international promising curators and offered it as an experimental platform that allows experimentation with innovative presentations and interpretations of design. Today, BIO operates as an open international experimental platform for the future of design. It explores new possible areas of design and creates opportunities for the development of the design profession and young artists. A key step in the reform of the biennial was made by Čelik by appointing Belgian Jan Boelen as curator of the jubilee performance of the biennial on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of its establishment. Jan Boelen gave the biennial a new, innovative form of design event and upgraded it from an international competition to international collaboration and experimentation. Author Zoë Ryan presented BIO.50 as one of the revolutionary and historically important exhibitions in her book As Seen: Exhibitions that Made Architecture and Design History. Critics of Metropolis magazine ranked BIO.25, curated in 2017 by Italian curator Angela Rui and Slovenian Maja Vardjan, among the ten best design and architectural events of 2017, and it also received the ICOM Slovenia award. The 26th Biennial of Design, chaired by Austrian curator Thomas Geiser and Brazilian Aline Lara Rezende, received the Valvasor Award, the Slovenian national award for curatorial achievements.

Based on the experience with BIO, the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia commissioned Čelik in 2016 to design the Creativity Center project, which set MAO as a key national institution with new applications for the development of the Slovenian creative sector.

Future Architecture
In 2015, he set up the Future Architecture platform through the Creative Europe call with MAO and 13 partner architectural organizations in Europe. With Celik’s establishment of the platform, MAO has become one of the most important centers of architectural research in Europe and the world. Steel has defined the collective mission of the platform, which is to direct critical thinking from the evaluation of architecture to the critical creation of ideas for the future. In doing so, he highlighted the most pressing social and ecological problems of humanity. He developed the concept of the platform, set objectives, criteria for partner involvement and a mechanism for creating a common public European architecture program, which he is leading to date. The community of the member organization has grown to 28 institutions and companies from 20 European countries since the establishment of the platform. In six years, the platform has recorded 2,400 entries in its annual calls for ideas and included more than 400 emerging experts in its programs.