"That organisation still exists today and it's called IAESTE, it's the International Association for the Exchange of Students for Technical Experience. And a good friend of mine, who I've already mentioned here, František Sedláček, was an officer of IAESTE. And the way it worked was that every year offers came in to all sorts of countries for student internships in different fields, and they delegated students to go. That was at the time of the loosening, wasn't it, of course. And he knew that, I was already in the job, I was no longer in school in '68, and the way they worked was that when the deadline was made by a certain date, I don't know now, May 31st or whatever, the unfilled positions that were offered - four in Finland, two in France, three in Germany, one in engineering, one here, one there - expired, and the organization got fewer offers for those positions the next year. That it was all student exchange, as many there, as many as here, yeah, that's the way it was, it worked, at least at the time. And so he knew that - and he knew that when then on the thirty-first, I guess, in May, that there were maybe ten places left, three here, three there. So my first engagement was that František Sedláček and I went to Norrköping, Sweden, to the paper mill Holmen Paper AB Bravikens Pappersbruk, a joint stock company, as two students of the chemistry faculty for practice."
"There were strikes in the nineteen-sixties, students were also on strike, there was a strike here at the school. I brought some papers toi be signed to the PPU [Prague Project Institute] and stood down there in the gatehouse, and as people were walking in I told them to sign in support of the strike, so people signed. Of course, they would notice you. Well, and then, when normalization came after 1969, they went to this Eisenreich, who was also like this somewhere.... And two, three times, a friend from the personal department was there and said, 'Look, guys,' like to Jirka, 'Hey, Jirka, you and Venca, you'd better get out of here quickly before they start following you.' So he thanked him and said, 'Look, they're after us, so we have to run away.' So we quit our jobs at once, and as I say, then we went to a cooperative in liquidation, then we went to Štěpánská Street to some contractor designer. We stayed there for a while and ended up at Investis, where coincidentally Malátek and Loos were in the studio run by the young Gočár, because they were part of the Rodas joint stock company, which were the companies that were created in 1967, 1968, 1969, which were then forcibly transferred to the United Studios of the City of Prague during the liquidation of private business."
"There was a threat for me, a year at the military service. We had a year in school as university students and a year of compulsory military service just somewhere else. At that time in our school, in the faculty, there was... There were no longer obligatory job placements, but offers of places. There were about three or four offers of places in that Military Project Institute. It was in Rooseveltova Street and also down on Na Můstku. The office on Můstek was mainly concerned with the construction of the underground. And the military one here in Rooseveltova focused mainly on airports and roads. And I heard from a friend of mine who was a little older... He said, 'Dude, normally, if you go to the MPI and you're a little bit lucky, when you get your draft order, they, if you're their employee, they can claim you for themselves from the military administration.' Well, I thought, well, I'll take my chances. So I took a chance, I went to the Military Project Institute. They took me in, I joined the MPI on June 20 or July 2, I don't know exactly now. And a couple of days later I got my draft order to go to the army, and a couple of days later I got a notice that the Military Project Institute had requested me from that military administration. So I had to serve six weeks in Trutnov for training, and there were all these tricksters like me, even from Slovakia. We were there for a while, it was fun, because we came there, and only on the fourth day, when they found out that we were, like me, with one other, architects, they gave us pencils and rulers, and we designed the gatehouse and the storehouse, and five people made a family house for the colonel and so on."
"Back then, in the job where I was, then after the revolution it was private, it was called Spojprojekt Praha, so at the time of the normalization I had a lot of resources for samizdat through a colleague. Today I have a full shelf at home, all possible things they came from abroad and it was all typed here. I was in a situation, where I received typescripts from a friend and those were already the first xeroxes (silly ones, but at least they existed) and I was always at work at our place (we were based in a house on a construction site in Kavčí Hory) and I always waited until work was over and nobody was there to make maybe 20 copies and then I put them somewhere and that's how it got distributed. I always hurried up to make it and I told myself that no one would see me. In addition, after the revolution there were certain debates, the head of our so-called centre was a communist. And there were also attacks on me and he said: 'Be careful, he was always against it. Always there in the evenings he kept multiplying the texts.' I didn't know about it; he knew of me and didn't turn me in."
"That was the Russian way. They divided your apartment in such a way that it was almost impossible. There was a hall from which we had a kitchen at one end; two rooms at the other end, and the two old people they put in there, they had one room and another across the hall. And from that kitchen there was a door to the bathroom. And they had a door to the bathroom from that room. We shared a bathroom and a common toilet in the hall. For fifteen years, we lived like that. Moreover, in that political situation in which especially dad was, so any solution like an exchange or offering us an apartment was out of the question. So, it was like... I remember how much mom was crying about."
"I had some signature sheets and in the then military project institute, I was already in civilian state, so we organized signing events there and they knew about it. So I was then in a similar situation to my friend. By chance, my acquaintance was there, who came and says: 'Look, Venco, if you can, get out of here quickly before they jump on you, because they've got everything you've been doing here.' And that was nothing, just a petition for Palach. So, I left at my own request. Then I changed jobs at three different places, I worked a few months here, a few months there, and maybe as I changed several jobs during the year, I could have gotten lost."
Architect Václav Aulický was born on March 1, 1944 in Prague. In 1967, he successfully graduated from the Faculty of Civil Engineering at the Czech Technical University (ČVUT) and began working at the Military Design Institute, where he participated in the design of Transgas buildings, among other things. From 1974, he worked at Spojprojekt, where he implemented a number of his own designs, of which the Žižkov television tower is probably the most famous. Since 2005, he has been teaching architecture at CTU. With his wife Zdenka, whom he met during his studies, he raised two daughters. In 2021, he lived in Prague.
