Can a building hold emotions?

In 2022, during my Media Design studies, I was assigned to create a photographic series built around my own concept. At the time, the world was still shaped by the pandemic, so photographing people wasn't a realistic option. Instead, I turned my attention to architecture.

Around the same time, the war in Ukraine had just begun. It sparked countless conversations with my mother about life during socialism in former Czechoslovakia. She often described a society where people were afraid to openly disagree with the regime because they never knew who might be listening.

Even today, she sometimes lowers her voice and says,

Quiet... even the walls have ears.

That sentence stayed with me...

I became fascinated by the invisible atmosphere of fear, uncertainty and psychological pressure that defined an entire generation. Not through dramatic historical events, but through ordinary everyday life. I wanted to explore whether a photograph could communicate those emotions without showing a single person.

The result became my university project, Re-Constructed Reality.

Re-Constructed reality

© 2022 Marcela Maxová

re-constructed reality

© 2022 Marcela Maxová

re-constructed reality

© 2022 Marcela Maxová

Using mirrored compositions, duplication and black-and-white photography, I transformed buildings and places into unsettling spaces where reality felt distorted. Places that looked recognizable, yet strangely impossible. My goal wasn't to document architecture, it was to visualize anxiety.

early influence

At the same time, I was discovering the history of modernist architecture. After centuries of ornament and decoration came movements like Modernism, Functionalism and, most importantly for me, Brutalism. Their honesty, monumental forms and unapologetic simplicity completely changed the way I looked at buildings.


Another major influence came from Constructivism and collage. During my studies I discovered Alexander Rodchenko, whose bold compositions and experimental visual language deeply inspired my own creative process. Photography gradually stopped being the final image. It became raw material for creating something entirely new.

next phase

Later, during my Erasmus exchange in Latvia and while travelling across post-socialist countries, I found myself searching for these buildings everywhere I went. While others looked for landmarks, I looked for rare housing estates, concrete monuments and brutalist structures. Every journey became another piece of a growing personal archive.

Every poster begins with a photograph I have taken myself. From there, I reconstruct reality through symmetry, collage and digital manipulation. The buildings lose their original function and become visual metaphors, spaces that exist somewhere between memory, architecture and imagination.

My work is not about nostalgia for the past, nor is it an attempt to glorify it.

But architecture outlives governments, ideologies and generations. It remembers what people often forget.

Rather than recreating the past, I reinterpret it through photography, symmetry and collage.

Each artwork begins with a place I have experienced, but it ends as something that exists only in imagination. If someone chooses to hang one of my prints on their wall, I hope they see more than architecture. I hope they discover a story of their own.

Every print begins with reality. It ends somewhere between history and imagination.

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