Brighton Marina
A talk by Eva Jiricna, with Ed Clark and Keith Williams
Recorded Tuesday 18th June 2024 at The Alan Baxter Gallery EC1
The early life of renowned architect and interior designer, Eva Jiřičná CBE RA, reads like a character from a John le Carré novel; born in Zlín, Czechoslovakia in 1939 days before the Nazis invaded. When she was six, the Nazi’s were driven out by Soviet forces, and by the time she was 9, Czechoslovakia was governed as a one party communist state. Her education through the years that followed taught her fluent Russian (so good that she was sent as a student to explain Czech glass manufacturing techniques to a Russian trade fair), physics and chemistry, before qualifying as an architect-engineer at Prague’s Technical University, with an MA from Prague’s Academy of Fine Arts.
She was 29 years old when on a visit to London, disaster struck; Czechoslovakia was invaded by Russia, a puppet government installed, her passport confiscated, and she was classified persona non grata. Fortunately, her London exile in 1968 was at the height of the Swinging Sixties - “a time when everything was being turned upside down – architecture, art, music, all of society. Every aspect of life could be reconsidered. We had choices, and the freedom to play with those choices”.
Eva’s extensive professional career spans over 60 years. A snapshot includes posts as President of London’s Architectural Association and Professor of Architecture & Design, University of Applied Arts, Prague; collaborations with Joseph Ettedgui, of acclaimed fashion shops, Joseph; the Richard Rogers Partnership, on the interiors of Lloyds Headquarters building, with Matthew Wells of Techniker on Somerset House’s, spelling binding Miles Stair, more sculptural installation, than functional staircase; and founding Eva Jiřičná’s Architects, a multidisciplinary practice, combining architecture and engineering (1982-2017) and co-founding Prague based practice, AI Design in 1999.
But her first significant job on arrival in the UK was Associate Architect for the Louis de Soissons Partnership on the Brighton Marina project. The project ended up lasting 11 years, and involved teamwork with Arup engineers and the use of new materials, in particular glass reinforced plastic (GRP). This confident mix of material science and close collaboration with engineers, would influence subsequent work -“All the materials I have ever used in the shops, staircases and apartments I have designed, I learned about at Brighton Marina”.
The project’s developers envisaged a marina like those they had seen on trips to the Mediterranean, with flats and restaurants lining quays set into the sea. But the mediterranean’s tidal range is around half a metre; that in the English Channel up to 6 metres. Eva’s solution was to create an enclosed non-tidal area close to the coast behind a spine made of land reclaimed from the sea, with the incidental benefit that this artificially created land provided further sites for development. Reaching out to sea, further breakwaters enclosed a tidal area that provided an additional protected body of water.
Conceived as one of Europe’s biggest yachting centres, a bird’s view depicts a vast structure resembling the disembodied, skeleton of a deep sea plantonesque type creature. The Brighton Marina Act 1968 enabled purchase of the foreshore and seabed at Black Rock on the Rottingdean side of town – approximately 2 miles east of Brighton centre. This location on the Sussex coast, provided access to 200 miles of French coastline within a 12-hour sail of Brighton; secure shelter between here and the United States, and access to a deepwater tidal harbour, avoiding wading through mud or rowing to sailing craft moored in an estuary.
As Eva wrote, “I look back now, and I think: how did I have the courage? I had to get on and just learn it”.