The 2025 Breathitt Lecture with Lucas Carlos de Lima Crystal Palaces: Designing a Better World Amidst Social Chaos

Lucas Carlos de Lima has been selected as the 2025 Breathitt Lecturer. He will give his lecture, Crystal Palaces: Designing a Better World Amidst Social Chaos, at 6.00pm on Thursday April 10, 2025, in the Hardymon Theater of the Davis Marksbury Building. This event is free and open to the public, but registration is advised. 

Wenzel Hablik was a Czech-born painter and designer who worked in Germany, during and after the Great War. When he was 6, Wenzel Hablik stared deep into a crystal he’d discovered in his hometown of Brüx. Inside, he saw “magical castles and mountains” that would haunt the artwork, architecture, and design of this polymath Czech artist for the rest of his life, and in those natural crystalline forms, he saw the power of creative forces.

Concomitantly, Pierre Chareau was a French architect and designer, whose most prominent work is a single-family house with a translucent facade composed of glass bricks that was completed in the Interwar Period. Chareau's belief that architecture should transcend mere functionality and become an expression of the human spirit is clearly illustrated by his quote "A house is not a machine to live in. It is the shell of man, his extension, his release, his spiritual emanation."

Unsurprisingly, the social context of the time in which both of these artists worked and the instability created by the war in Europe had a tremendous impact on the work created. The Modernist movement was sweeping across various disciplines, casting aside traditional constraints and offering a fresh perspective that emphasized function, simplicity, and a harmonious relationship between form and purpose. Both Hablik and Chareau share an interest in utopian architecture, or better said, in understanding the relationship between social issues and architecture. Both artists are idealists, believing that humanity’s greatest achievements will arise from careful consideration of how architecture could embody the aspirations of an industrial age while promoting societal well-being.