The Chatarství-Summerhouses project focuses on the creativity of the Czech chata: hundreds of thousands of simple and small summerhouses, improvised and self-built by their owners since the 1920s far on the outskirts of towns.
The photographed chatarství mirror the extraordinary personalities of their builders in both a negative and positive way: these people are individuals forming a collective dream.
Each construction creates a world of its own, an escape from day-to-day reality as well as from rigid housing typologies. Yet, these chatarství are not emergency shelters, they are architectures of abstract human happiness: they do not bow humbly in their corner, but govern their own small space in matter and spirit.
The hundreds of structures documented in this project reflect a changing society and human dreams in chains. A sort of do-it yourself mania showing a special type of Czech rambler romanticism and the relationship between people and their homeland, a relative absence of religion (Christianity) and a passion for nature, for freedom and a sense of community.