"We just normally opened the door and told the secretaries, that we're occupying it here, and that we're giving the other employees a few days to clear out their things. We made a list of everything that was there. How many computers there are, how many typewriters, well, and the whole apparatus came over onto our side. At that moment we had fax, telephones, offices, we had scribes. At that moment we could start to get into the action and the secretaries and scribes were continually paid by the Union of Architects. It was this little kind of funny business..."
"Thanks to the fact that both my parents were excluded from the party, we had a bad cadre review. The street committee of the KSČ of course protested to me studying anything at all. My father was searching for an opening as an artisanal blacksmith and was checking out various workshops, so that I could get into studying. And well my mom went at it from the completely opposite angle. She crossed the street and rang the bell of the comrade, who was in charge of the street committee of the party. Right on the doorstep she slapped him across the face and said: 'Look here, the fact that you threw us out of our jobs is one thing, that's just our life, but you won't be touching my kids! If you don't give him a recommendation to a gymnasium, then I'll slap you to hell publicly right in self-service. I don't care about it whatsoever, because we're sick and tired of everything from you.' And so my dad tried to solve the situation pragmatically. My mom took the approach of radical sincerity, which I inherited from her."
"My father for example went to interrogations almost every year. He came home at eleven o'clock. For me it was always only circumstantial. I later got rid of by telling them: "Comrade, I hope you won't be telling someone, about what we discussed here." And well I went straight to the first pub where I had friends, where I knew some cop was watching them. I threw open the pub's doors and started shouting, that I was just coming from Barťák and that we were talking about Franta, and that they asked about you, Milan, Andula, etc. And that undercover cop saw me of course, given there we máničky sitting there. And I don't even know who it was, but they gave a report that I'm an untrustworthy person, who's going to blurt out everything from the interrogations in Bartolomějská. With this I got rid of all of it and they left me alone. Except for a few excesses that I later carried out."
Ivan Vavřík was born on the 8th of July 1958 in Prague. He spent his childhood in Suchdol. His father, PhDr. Josef Vavřík, CSc., was a sociologist, and was later thrown out of the communist party (KSČ) and faculty after 1968 due to holding reformist opinions. His mother Ludmila Vavříková was also a convinced communist and also met the same fate as her husband. She wasn’t allowed to be a teacher, and so became a cook. In 1974 Ivan Vavřík managed to get into Gymnázium Arabská despite a bad cadre review. He befriended many people in the Prague underground and became a “mánička”. He read samizdat works, transcribed books, listened to western music and reproduced the Charter 77. He wasn’t allowed to study neither the humanities nor pedagogy. He was accepted into a construction faculty at ČVUT in 1977. Two years later he transferred to architecture, where he focused on medieval buildings. He was very active among his friends in the underground. They held exhibitions, readings, theatre plays, lectures, talks and happenings. He was interrogated by the StB (secret police) three times. From 1987 onwards he openly fought against the redevelopment of Žižkov. He organized the creation of an alternative group of architects counter to the official Union of Architects (Svaz architektů). “Skupina Vokolo Vosmýho,” VESPA and finally in 1989 the official union Obecní dům with 150 members. On the 20th of November 1989 he occupied the union Czechoslovak Union of Architects (Československý svaz architektů) at Malá Strana and subsequently founded the Citizens’ Forum of Architects (Občanské fórum architektů), where they were preparing a law about the architectural chamber. Ivan Vavřík founded his own architecture company in 1990.
