The phrase ‘Trainspotting Hotel’ probably doesn’t conjure visions of a cozy, comfortable and safe place to lay your head at night, but this hotel gets its nickname from its location overlooking rail tracks rather than anything relating to the heroin-charged cult classic film. Obviously, that’s a good thing for guests who want to enjoy a peaceful getaway on the Elbe River near the town of Litomerice, Czech Republic at this unusual pop-up structure by Artikul Architects. 

The hotel is comprised of just three shipping containers, with one forty-foot crate stacked atop two twenty-foot crates in a perpendicular arrangement to create a covered space underneath. The two ground-floor containers house the bathrooms, storage and one of the guest rooms, while four more guest accommodations are set into the top layer.

The client commissioned Artikul to produce a modular design that can be easily taken apart and moved when desired, and would have a light footprint on the land. The hotel has its own built-in water reservoir for the showers and sinks, and utilizes waterless toilets, and the bedrooms are compact but warm and welcoming, fitted with bunk beds and lined with birch plywood.

Artikul is known for producing sustainable structures, so it’s no surprise that they did something creative using recycled and natural materials. Barely any modification to the containers was necessary, preserving the ability to load them onto a truck. The top container is sheathed in reclaimed wood and features a terrace and awning so guests can hang out in the open air and enjoy the views.

A giant metallic head splits into segments and rotates in a ‘metamorphosis’ worthy of its subject, author Franz Kafka. All 42 of its layers spin independently, catching the sunlight on their reflective stainless steel edges, magnifying the strange transformation as the head briefly blurs into something more abstract and then comes together again. The 45-ton sculpture was installed in a Prague plaza in 2014, visualizing the inner workings of a psyche the sculptor may identify with, himself. It’s perhaps the tamest and least controversial piece Czech artist David Cerný has ever put out for public consumption.

Entitled ‘K’, the sculpture has a nearly-identical twin called METALMORPHOSIS in Technology Plaza in Charlotte, North Carolina, which even had its own live webcam feed for a while so anyone in the world could watch passersby interact with it at any given moment. The Charlotte version is not based on Kafka, and sits in the center of a fountain, occasionally spitting water. Its mirrored exterior almost makes it seem like an optical illusion in certain lights, like some kind of apparition made of the sky itself.

Born in Prague, David ?erný first gained notoriety in 1991 when he took it upon himself to paint a Soviet tank serving as a war memorial in his home city bright pink. A number of his statues feature grown men peeing, and the literally masturbatory ‘Nation for Itself Forever’ had to be perched on the roof of the National Theater to keep it from being defaced.

Crawling babies with bizarrely punched-in faces scale the Czech Republic’s highest tower and wander blindly around parks, while the nation’s most revered saint, St. Wenceslas, is depicted riding a dead horse. A permanent exhibition at FUTURA gallery Prague features ladders leading up to two white posteriors; climb up and stick your head inside to view a video of two Czech politicians spoon-feeding each other to ‘We Are the Champions.” Czech out a tour of the irreverent sculptor’s works in Prague if you’re ever in the city to see them all.

If you just happen to stumble upon the dilapidated St. George’s Church in the Czech Republic, passing through the crumbling entrance to glance around at the shadowy interior, you might just be in for the most terrifying moment of your life. Abandoned since the 1960s, the church has long since been devoid of human worshippers, but that doesn’t mean it’s empty. Ghostly shrouded figures line its pews, some hovering in doorways and in the aisles.

Located in the northwestern Bohemia town of Luková, the ‘Church of Nine Ghosts’ first fell into disrepair after the ceiling caved in during a funeral service in 1968. Locals took that as a bad omen, and boarded up the 14th century structure, holding services outside instead. But many residents saw the church as an important part of the town’s history, and wanted to see it restored.

“The figures represent the ghosts of Sudeten Germans who lived in Lukova before World War Two and who came to pray at this church every Sunday,” says artist Jakub Hadrava, who was commissioned to create the installation. “I hope to show the world that this place had a past and it was a normal part of everyday life, but that fate has a huge influence on our lives.”

Made of plaster, the ghosts were put in place over the summer of 2014 in the hopes of drawing more tourists to the region, raising money to rehabilitate the historic 1352 church. The plan worked, as people have come from all over the world to see the statues in this unusual environment, and the church will soon be restored to its former glory.

Great art is, by necessity, innovative and adaptable. It breaks rules, defies logic, and twists about in ways that we never saw coming. The photography of Miroslav Tichý takes everything we thought we knew about photography and turns it on its head, giving us a catalog of work that is at once carelessly incomplete and remarkably full. Where most photographers treat their work with gentle hands, Tichý threw his in corners, burned it for warmth, stacked it in piles and let it succumb to the elements. But today enough of it remains that we can still catch a glimpse inside the mind of this brilliantly eccentric artist.

MT Inv. no.: 7-(3-)6, courtesy of Foundation Tichy Ocean

Miroslav Tichý was born in 1926 into a turbulent Czechoslovakia. He studied art at the Academy of Arts in Prague and was thought of as a talented painter, but he grew frustrated when the academy stopped providing nude models for his paintings. He dropped out and became isolated, with mental illness and a harsh government both working to squelch his creativity. By the late 1950s he was no longer painting. In 1972, after being institutionalized, the artist’s studio was taken away.

MT Inv. no.: 1-35 and 1-41, courtesy of Foundation Tichy Ocean

After turning his back on the art world, however, Tichý would find a new passion: his own unique blend of photography and drawing. He set out with homemade cameras, often fashioned from discarded materials like cardboard toilet paper tubes, tapes and eyeglasses – and he took photographs of unsuspecting women. He printed the photographs himself with a homemade enlarger, and often embellished them by drawing directly on them with pencil or giving them carefully-constructed paper frames bearing hand-drawn decorations.

MT Inv. no.: OT-244, 3-(8-)23, 2-192, and 3-(8-)22 courtesy of Foundation Tichy Ocean

Tichý’s work is voyeuristic on the surface; he documented the beauty that he saw in Communist Czechoslovakia, embodied in women he saw on the streets. The women tolerated his presence, largely because they didn’t believe the homemade cameras he pointed at them were real. But the images he created of them show the careful artist’s soul that has always resided in the sometimes-unkempt body.

MT Inv. no.: 4-1 and 2-250, courtesy of Foundation Tichy Ocean

The blurry, oddly-framed photographs were exceptionally subversive for their time; long before the Velvet Revolution, artists and students were creating works that exemplified their desires for freedom of expression. Tichý created images that are dream-like but gritty, utterly personal and a little creepy, but deliberate and almost documentary-like in nature. The artist not only admired the forms of these women; he identified with their conspiratorial whispers and giggling confessions to one another.

MT Inv. no.: 3-(8-)15 and 3-(8-)24, courtesy of Foundation Tichy Ocean

Miroslav Tichý is now in his 80s and confronting international attention to his work for the first time ever. For many years his photographs simply lay about, scattered carelessly on the floor and any available surface, until friend and neighbor Roman Buxbaum rescued the body of work. Buxbaum promoted the artist’s work and directed the documentary that is now being shown alongside Tichý’s photographs.

MT Inv. no.: 1-30, 2-232 and 1-32, courtesy of Foundation Tichy Ocean

It would be simple to dismiss this man’s work as the perverted photographs of a lecherous old man, but there is so much more to these pictures of the female form. The deliberate shunning of modern photographic equipment, the secret nature of his snapshots, the complete isolation in which Tichý created his prints and the obscene indifference he showed to his work all contribute to the air of mystery surrounding the body of work.

MT Inv. no.: 3-(8-)27 and 4-(3-)267, courtesy of Foundation Tichy Ocean

Although created with primitive equipment and tossed about for decades like worthless scraps, these photographs all share a strikingly modern beauty. Their folds, rips and stains only add to the suggestion of outsider art. But this trained artist is far from being an outsider; his work is now being admired by people all around the world.

MT Inv. no.: 1-17 and 3-(8-)35, courtesy of Foundation Tichy Ocean

The first show of Tichý’s photography was in the 2004 Seville Biennial. Since then, these beautiful (if slightly disturbing) photographs have been exhibited in shows across the globe. And while it may be difficult to reconcile one’s attraction to these subversive images with the feeling that these women have been somehow violated, it’s important to know that, in the hands of this fascinating artist, the beauty of these impromptu models was never taken for granted.

All photographs used with permission from Foundation Tichy Ocean.