Machonin led the Alfa studio within a Czechoslovak state design institute in the late 1960s, winning a run of public competitions jointly with his wife and lifelong practice partner, Věra Machoninová, whom he had married in 1948. Their shared idiom, built mostly in the 1970s, took Brutalism toward a faceted, crystalline geometry: repeating hexagonal or angular cells multiplied across a footprint rather than a single sculpted mass, clad in board-marked concrete and metal panelling. Kotva, the department store the couple designed for central Prague, and the Hotel Thermal at Karlovy Vary are the clearest statements of it. Machonin also worked alone on housing, including the Lehovec estate in Prague, before his death in January 1990 at the age of sixty-nine.
