The present study explores the relationship between language and architecture as symbolic systems against the background of the creation of independent Czechoslovakia at the end of World War I. It ...takes as its focus the Prague Castle, and the intent of the first President of Czechoslovakia, philosopher Thomas Garrigue Masaryk (1850--1937), to "democratize" the vast complex of historic structures that formed it, with the help of the Slovenian architect Joze Plecnik (1872--1957). To effect change in the charged, historically circumscribed spaces of the Castle can be viewed as a language analogy mainly in the terms of creating new relationships . Polysemy is a characteristic, sometimes dominant, feature of the transformation process.
In the hierarchy of public spaces, the Castle was meant to constitute the ultimate symbolic space not just for Prague, but for the entire nation. Memory as recollection, but also as imagination and ingegno, impelled symbolic action both verbally and architecturally. Plecnik's own "grammar of creation" sought constitutive forms in the traditions of Antiquity and ancient Egypt, in Masaryk's ideas of democratic governance as well as in the collective memory of the city. These were the informing principles that created a more layered referential field.
The invention of the tradition and symbolic identity of the Castle in the new context of republican Czechoslovakia was a complex process accompanied by competing narratives. Masaryk wished the Castle to become "a symbol of our Czech and Slovak national democratic ideals," and spoke of a need to "embody" the new parliament in search for an ethical existence rooted in faith and self-education, imbued with both scientific rigour and poetic making, and implemented through the everyday work by all citizens.
A unique example of another type of narrative is a body of correspondence addressed to Plecnik between 1920 and 1956 by the President's daughter, Alice Garrigue Masaryk (1879--1966), who represented her father in his role as patron and served as a conduit between him, the Castle Building Administration and Plecnik himself. A close reading of these letters explores to interrogate the role of language in both the transmission of tradition and in the actual process of architectural making and constitutes an original contribution to scholarship.
