Eva Jiřičná

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Eva Jiřičná CBE (born March 3, 1939) is a renowned Czech architect, entrepreneur, and designer, active in London. She is known for her creative work with glass and steel to create work of a distinctly modern style. Jiřičná is famous for her design of decorative steel and glass staircases.

[edit] Biography

Eva was born in Zlín, Czechoslovakia. She attended the Prague Polytechnics and the Prague Academy of Fine Arts. After the Czech uprising of 1968, Jiřičná sought refuge in Britain. There she progressed quickly from the Greater London Council architects department to the Louis de Soissons Partnership to work on Brighton Marina, before joining Richard Rogers RA, handling many of the interiors on the Lloyds of London headquarters. A chance meeting with the fashion designer Joseph Ettedgui led to a commission to design his flat, and then a succession of shops for his Joseph stores and other retailers. In these projects she showed how shop design could be successfully treated in an architectural manner, away from the interior decoration genre.

Eva is probably most famous for her work on shop interiors. Jiřičná's hallmark was to transform often ordinary shop units into elegant displays for luxury goods and clothes. She was one of the pioneeres of using glass as a structural material, partly because it improved transparency and daylight in the shops, but she also exploited its potential to surprise and delight. Shoppers found themselves ascending staircases whose treads were transparent, and whose means of support were filigree-like stainless steel wires whose reflectivity made them almost invisible.