Democracy is responsibility
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Vladimír Matoušek was born in Jaroměřice near Jevíčko on 28 April 1921. He completed primary school in Jevíčko and the first stage of grammar school, from which he transferred to a high school. His studies at the Faculty of Architecture and Civil Engineering in Brno were interrupted by the closure of Czech universities on 17 November 1939. He was totally deployed to the Donawitz Ironworks in Styria in 1943, where he worked until 1944. He spent the end of the war in Svitavy as a construction technician and worked briefly as a translator for the national committee in Jevíčko. After the liberation, he returned to study architecture in Brno, then joined the urban planning department of Stavoprojekt in Brno and then moved to the newly established Institute of Urban Planning where he eventually took over the director position. He got married in 1955 and his son Vladimír was born a year later. In 1966 he took the position of director of the Brno branch of the Research Institute of Construction and Architecture. He earned the Candidate of Technical Sciences title, but was removed from his senior position over signing The Two Thousand Words and speaking up against the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops. He worked in a rank-and-file position until retirement in the 1980s. After the fall of the communist regime, he took the job as an external lecturer at the Faculty of Architecture of the Brno University of Technology.
