A House Within, Michal Škoda’s farewell exhibition at the House of Art in České Budějovice, is less a survey of Malý Chmel’s work than a full-scale spatial argument. A precise inner house of six rooms is slipped into the gallery’s white cube, instantly recalibrating every step, every glance, every breath of light. One narrow slit keeps the original envelope in view, a whispered reminder that architecture is always something built inside something else.

The title is literal as well as metaphorical: the largest model inside this temporary house is Malý Chmel’s permitted, fully documented, yet indefinitely postponed reconstruction of this very building, designed with AFF Architekten. The rest are not models in the usual sense but inhabitable objects, crafted at generous scale with palpable materiality, meant to be circled, entered, and felt as much as read. They radiate the studio’s quiet obsessions: context that is listened to rather than imposed upon, scale that feels inevitable, structure that reveals itself without shouting.

There is no storyline, only a sequence of compressions and releases, of shadowed corridors opening onto pools of daylight, of plaster, wood, and metal speaking directly to the body. Representation and presence collapse into one continuous experience.

In the end the exhibition is a dare: can architecture be shown without being flattened into images or explanations? Malý Chmel answers by building a fleeting, walk-through manifesto that insists every serious building begins as an act of patient, tactile spatial hunger.