"I think architecture can be very different. It can be rational or irrational. Or it can be different. But only two things apply here. Either it's good or it's bad. For architecture to be good, I think it has to do three things. First, it has to be useful. It can't be some architectural or artistic concoction that it might fall down or something like that, if you know what I mean. And it has to be pretty, too. So that's my professional credo."
"He said that basically architecture can be beautiful, but it has to have function. If it doesn't have a function, it's not used and it decays. But now I remember one such sentence he said: Gentlemen, don't think when you walk down the street and see these buildings that everything is architecture. Only a little bit is architecture and everything else is construction. And that kind of connects to me to this day, because we call everything architecture today."
"During the Protectorate I went to a so-called municipal school, which was a four-class, four-year school. And then there was one that went up to the sixth grade, and finish. Or after the fourth grade, you could go to a grammar school or a bourgeois school. Of course, I thought I would go to the grammar school, my parents thought so too, and one evening my father came and said - you won't go to the grammar school, you'll go to the bourgeois school, because the entrance exam for the grammar school requires knowledge of Hitler's biography, and you won't learn that. So he enrolled me in the bourgeois school, so I went to the bourgeois school for the last year of the war."
"I was assigned to a department store studio. We didn't even know what a department store should or looked like nowadays, because you weren't allowed to travel, nobody else here knew either, and so we started groping around in foreign magazines. And there were some very good magazines coming into the place, like Domus, Architecture Review and so on. And in one magazine there was a department store in Rotterdam. And you can imagine how much interest there was in that magazine to look at it, and well, basically we kind of learned from that. There we learned that the most valuable place in a department store is the high wall. And that's because you can stick a shelf of merchandise against that wall, whereas that other area, those shelves couldn't be that high. So it's a windowless box, you could say. That was a proper department store back then."
Jan Melichar was born on 6 April 1934 in Olomouc to Jan Melichar and Štěpánka, née Koblihová. After graduating from the real grammar school he was admitted to the Faculty of Architecture and Civil Engineering at the Brno University of Technology. He studied under the guidance of professors B. Fuchs, B. Rozehnal and A. Kurial in 1959. After graduation he joined the Brno branch of Potravinoprojekt, later transformed into the State Project Institute of Trade (SPÚO) in Brno, where he was employed until 1992. As an architect there he designed mainly hotels and department stores, the most important of which was Prior in Olomouc, completed in 1982. He was also involved in the design of exhibition displays and, through the Dílo company, carried out reconstruction and interior design projects. In 1990 he founded his own design office in Brno, AID Kontakt. He is a member of the ČKAIT and the Association of Architects, where he served as chairman for some time. In 2018 he received the Jože Plečnik Award for Merit for Czech Architecture.
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