An architect in a world of engineers – Škoda Storyboard

Leave your ego at the door

Today, Matěj Vydra is the only architect in Škoda Technical Development, a section employing three thousand people. Among the projects he has worked on are a footbridge over the Jizera River designed by the famous Czech architect Josef Pleskot and the Virtual Development Centre, which was inaugurated in January 2024. He tries to dispel stereotypical ideas of an architect as someone who stubbornly asserts his own ideas and isn’t open to debate.

“Ego can be a hindrance in architecture, and you can’t go about things that way here. We are an industrial enterprise – we have to be able to execute an investment plan in a way that ensures the company gets a return on its investment as soon as possible. I am on the investor side, so I can exert a major influence on the quality of the result, more so than the contractors, in fact. I define the brief and make sure that the external companies fulfil it. I try to work with the best architects. Having good partners is a prerequisite for a good result,” he explains.

The only architect among the three thousand Škoda Technical Development employees

Although the typical architect has his head full of buildings and urban development projects, Matěj Vydra likes to switch off by escaping into the countryside. “I am drawn to mountains. I love sleeping in mountain huts in the Alps, where you can trace how the sun streaks across the landscape, minute by minute. Which brings me back to architecture. As the most important architects of the 20th century like Louis Kahn and Le Corbusier said: light is the cornerstone of architecture.”