"Karel Hubáček had charisma, that's a rare gift, and I think it significantly helped the office." – "How did it help him outwardly?" – "Probably partly too. Karel Hubáček was a person born in 1924, he went through forced labour in Germany, and after an air raid, he escaped from the forced labour from Berlin back to Prague. This was understandably a serious problem, so after he got some sleep, he went to report himself to relevant German places – he said he had lost all his clothes and needed to be replenished. They accepted this and delivered him back to Berlin."
"At the time, SIAL rebuilt the pub Na Jedlové in Račice, here on the outskirts of Liberec. It was a kind of trip pub with a bar and a hall with a stage for dancing. By the time we got there, it hadn't functioned like that for a long time already. We got the hall and the whole ground floor available. We installed some cubicles and cells where you could sleep. Everyone had his own cubicle, downstairs, he had a drawing board, and above it, a bunk bed and some mattresses where he slept. There was a kitchen with a wonderful vaulted dining room with a bar. Of course, a bathroom, a workshop, a darkroom. We had all of this available there. And that huge hall, where almost no one worked... I sometimes worked there, on principle, because there was a lot of space. But the hall served especially as a space for social life. We invited friends there who appreciated that it was out of everyone's sight and that it was a place where it was possible to meet freely and have fun."
"My grandfather, my father's father, was the carpenter I was talking about, had already done compulsory military service in Dalmatia and then enlisted there during the war, leaving his wife and two very small children at home. Grandfather did that–because he did not care about Austria–so somewhere on patrol in the hills, he shot off the index finger on his right hand. Carpenter. To escape from the war. Which he finally managed to do. He got home safe and sound. After the war, as a veteran, he became a city constable and didn't really do carpentry work anymore."
Jiří Suchomel was born on September 14, 1944, in Kladno. He came from a family of an architect and a doctor. The parents joined the Communist Party after the Second World War, but after 1968, the conservative communists expelled them from the party. After graduating in 1961, he started to study architecture at the Czech Technical University in Prague. He experienced the release of the atmosphere during the Prague Spring, which he used to travel to Western countries. The entry of Warsaw Pact troops into Czechoslovakia reached him in Aachen. Although he considered staying, he eventually returned to Czechoslovakia. He started working in the SIAL studio under the leadership of Karel Hubáček. It was in the SIAL building on Jedlová street where he met Václav Havel. He later visited the future president several times in Hrádeček. In 1983, the architects had to move out of the workplace on Jedlová street. In January 1985, he took over the leadership of SIAL from Karel Hubáček. In the 1980s, he made several business trips to West Berlin and Moscow. After the Velvet Revolution, he taught at the University of Michigan for one semester. He was one of the co-founders of the Faculty of Architecture of the Technical University in Liberec and its first dean. He later worked as vice dean of the same faculty. In 2022, Jiří Suchomel still lived in Liberec.
