The US Army Memorial in Pilsen

The history of the US Army Memorial in Pilsen dates back to the period shortly after the end of the Second World War. The competition for the best memorial proposal, announced in 1946, was won by sculptor Oskar Kozák. The foundation stone was laid in the very same year, but during the demonstrations in May 1948 the stone was removed and probably taken to some unknown dump. At the occasion of the then president Václav Havel’s and ambassador Shirley Temple-Black’s visit to Pilsen in 1990, the foundation stone for the memorial was laid again. In 1993, a new competition for the memorial was announced, this time with fifty people participating in it. The jury chose the proposal of Vladmír Preclík, but it was not accepted well by the public. The city council has therefore decided to organize an open workshop where anyone interested could participate in a discussion about the planned memorial. In the end, the final form of the memorial, accepted also by the public, took the shape of two granite pylons and a circular plate set into the ground in the middle. The “Thank You America” memorial, revealed in 1995, is the work of a team of authors: its overall form is courtesy of the architect Jan Soukup and the bronze items were made by František Bálek. Due to the non-standard form of the competition, all of the authors of the memorial had to pledge to give up the entitlement to the authorship and the memorial is nowadays perceived as collective anonymous work.

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