Art in architecture

What is art in architecture?

Art in architecture is an artwork that is planned as part of a building. It can be a mosaic, a relief, a ceramic wall or a painted surface. The architect and the artist agree its place and its material while the building is still in design.

Slovak buildings of the socialist period show the range. The table lists four examples from the register of modern architecture and from archiweb.

Building	Artwork	Author
Prior department store, Bratislava	Wall clock with a chime	Jaroslav Kočiš
Prior department store, Bratislava	Ceramic wall in the buffet area	Eva Trachtová
Istropolis, Bratislava	Lamellar ceiling of the congress hall	Jozef Jankovič
Slovak Radio, Bratislava	Interiors	Marta Skočková

The Czech mosaic article describes three forms of mosaic used in this period. These are mosaic from split glass enamel tesserae, stone structural mosaic and mosaic from prefabricated pressed tesserae.

What was the "four percent law" in Czechoslovakia?

The "four percent law" is the nickname of a Czechoslovak government resolution on fine art in investment construction. Pavel Karous gives it as Resolution No. 355 of July 1965. His article names 28 July in one passage and 23 July in another. The nickname is misleading. The resolution set a share of 1 percent of the budget of a state building, and only in exceptional cases up to 4 percent.

Question	What Karous (2015) says
Which budget?	The budget of a state building. At that time this covered nearly all building projects.
What was the 4 percent?	A ceiling. It was meant to stop overpriced and costly decoration of the kind known from the Stalinist period.
How was the share set?	By a formula: a base rate that falls as the cost of the building rises, times a coefficient for the importance of the place, times a coefficient for the social and architectural importance of the building.
What did a housing estate get?	The estates in the study had coefficients of 0.5 to 1.0. About half to one percent of the estate budget went to art.
When was the work approved?	During the design of the building, so that the finished building was not decorated afterwards.

The article studies Czech housing estates. It describes a rule of the Czechoslovak government. This page does not state how the rule worked in Slovakia, because we found no Slovak source on it.

How did censorship and propaganda affect building art?

Karous writes that censorship affected exterior monumental art to a surprisingly small extent. He adds that artists who were otherwise persecuted could show their work in housing estates. Facade works of the period are therefore not only political art.

The Czech mosaic article gives a mixed picture. After 1948 mosaic became the most popular instrument of political propaganda. It later dropped its ideological content and became one of the most progressive art forms in architecture. Today mosaic still carries the stigma of an ideological art form. The authors say this led to neglect of post-war work. They also name a lack of qualified restorers and poor availability of materials as problems.

Is building art protected by Slovak heritage law?

Not by age alone. The heritage fund is the set of movable and immovable things declared as national cultural monuments, heritage reserves and heritage zones (§ 2 ods. 1 of Act 49/2002). Artistic (výtvarné) value is one of the heritage values listed in the act (§ 2 ods. 2). The Monuments Board can declare a group of things together (§ 15 ods. 1).

So an attached mosaic, relief or ceramic wall is protected only if the declaration covers it. Renovation and restoration rules apply to a monument or its part (§ 32 ods. 1 and § 33 ods. 1). The Prior and Hotel Kyjev complex is a national cultural monument since 26 June 2025, according to the open data of the Monuments Board. Those data name the complex. We did not read the declaration decision, so we do not state whether it names the artworks. The web text on Slov-Lex is informative only. Compare the wording with the PDF. See listed building.

What should an owner check before changing building art?

• Find out whether the building or any part of it is declared under the heritage act. Do not assume protection from its age.
• Identify the technique and, if records survive, the artist and the date. Archives can hold the commissioning papers.
• Survey the artwork before any cleaning, repainting or insulation work. External insulation can cover a facade artwork.
• Ask the regional heritage office before you remove, move or cover an artwork on a monument.
• Look for a restorer with experience of the technique. Mosaic restorers are scarce, according to the Czech article.

Each step costs little at the survey stage. It can prevent damage to an artwork that nobody noticed. See sgrafito and socialist-era mosaic for two common techniques.