This issue of ERA21 was originally meant to focus on Zoological Gardens. As summarised in the introduction text, different impulses led to us shifting our field of interest away from these places of worldly entertainment of looking into limited animal enclosures. The abstract act of erasing boundaries between people and wild animals crossed the popular glass divides of zoo exhibits. Animals range free now, in their natural territories—though these are greatly diminished due to human activity. And ERA21 is looking at ways of expanding these territories again, physically as well as semantically. It strives for emancipation from the subordination to the anthropocentric approach to the environment and for the discovery of new ecologies of interspecies coexistence. As it turns out, rewilding doesn't have to end in regression, instead it can stimulate a fascinating transgression.

Petr Hájek is one of those architects who take the sound aspects very seriously in their work. Always focused on acoustics, ever since the first HŠH architects’ projects, he’s not afraid to have the building’s main conceptual idea guided by it. But recently his interest in sound and music peaked when he took to the stage with an experimental musical composition, as co‑author alongside notable musicians and conductors. Current projects, his students’ peculiar studio assignments, or composed architecture and urbanism were all things discussed in our conversation with Petr Hájek.