Hut̕ architektury Martin Rajniš

Martin Rajnis is on his fourth life. With his small Prague-based firm, Hut Architecktury Martin Rajnis, the 76-year-old architect has spent the past decade constructing some of the most fantastic and the most humble structures in the Czech Republic. For decades, Rajnis's name was most closely associated with the Máj department store in Prague, a 1970s landmark of late modernism that elevated Rajnis and partners John Eisler and Miroslav Masák to the status of national architectural celebrity. In the mid-1990s, Rajnis and his colleagues worked with the likes of Jean Nouvel, Hon. FAIA, to help design a new neighborhood of modern office buildings and mixed-use shopping centers in the city figuratively and literally scrubbing away the district's Communist residue. Today, Rajnis has little interest in the megaprojects that defined the first half of his career. Instead, he prefers smaller, more esoteric projects: observation towers, wooden bridges, maintenance sheds. Besides their agrarian steampunk aesthetic, what unifies Rajni's more recent output is the pursuit of what he calls prirozena architektura, or natural architecture.