Zprávy památkové péče 2018, 78(5):487-499 | DOI: 10.56112/zpp.2018.5.09

My home is my castle. Formation of family housing in Brno 1919-1925. Žabovřesky: from village to garden district

Pavla Cenková, Aleš Homola

NPÚ, ÚOP v Brně

The article focuses on the process of the formation of a large residential zone in the Žabovřesky quarter of Brno in the first half of the 20th century and focuses on the urban, architectural, and sociological-historical viewpoints. This territory, primarily containing private family houses, was selected as a laboratory sample of the preferences and possibilities of the builders of the new Czech middle class that formed in Brno with the emergence of the Czechoslovak Republic and Greater Brno. The extraordinary building boom was made possible by the generous supportive activity of the state as well as by the first developer entrepreneurs who significantly affected the construction of the district. The emergence of this new district dates back to the period before the First World War, when the first two colonies of villas built by Czech builders, in the spirit of the English ideas of the garden town, were formed on the open countryside of the separate suburban village of Žabovřesky. Following the disasters of the war and as part of the new constitutional system, the new Czechoslovak Republic initiated a solution to the poor housing crisis through a series of significant legislative measures to stimulate the far-reaching construction activities of private builders, cooperatives, and construction entrepreneurs. From the group of builders who participated in the building of the Žabovřesky residential zone, František Hrdina was the most prominent, whose share in the appearance of the quarter is unmistakable. Hrdina was also, as one of the first real developers, the forerunner of the extensive building activities of the famous Brno developers Václav Dvořák and Vilém and Alois Kuba, who initially cooperated professionally with František Hrdina.
In Moravia and Silesia, grants for this aforementioned state building aid were mediated and controlled by the Department of Civil Engineering of the State Political Administration in Brno, which executed state inspection of new buildings. The archive of this office is preserved in the funds of the Moravian Archives and provides an extensive and extremely valuable source of information for interwar civil engineering in the whole of Moravia. For construction projects in Žabovřesky in the first half of the 1920's, there were 88 cases found in the fund in which the address of the house could be identified and thus the archive data could be associated with a specific building. The studied set of builders is nearly completely associated with the middle social class with a large predominance of employment of an official character; only in two cases are they builders from a manually working environment. In the remaining two cases, these are individuals on the opposite side of the social spectrum. If the builders were women, they were financially self-sufficient and apparently single women or widows who received a pension for a deceased husband or other property security, with the frequent occurrence of war widows after the First World War.
At the beginning of the 1920's, the massively emerging Czech middle class was seeking and finding its social position for the first time. The material reflection of this was the home as the seat of the family and a refuge from all the shocks and twists of the modern age. Houses that originated at the time of the fall of the old authorities, when the order of the world was being destroyed by the horrors of war and a series revolutions but while faith in a purification through modernity, in the Masaryk State, and in the ideal of the new order of humanist society was increasing, are notable in their architectural quality and picturesqueness given by their specific formal design in the spirit of "traditionalist modernism". Modernist and traditionalist elements in this type of construction meet in an original synthesis, often with a remarkable result of undisputable aesthetic qualities. Although these residential buildings were limited by the financial means of their builders, they still held a distinctive representation function, and their high building culture and contemporary architectural form created a modern visual identity of the middle class.
Even today, the preserved urban unit still reflects the building activity, taste, and economic possibilities of the Czech middle class, the main social support of the first Czechoslovak Republic, and the bearer of its ethos. Unfortunately, the protection of the heritage values of this territory and of these valuable buildings is very inadequate. This would be resolved by the declaration of the Brno heritage zone, as has been prepared by the National Heritage Institute.

Keywords: interwar architecture, Brno, 1920's, residential construction, Žabovřesky

Published: December 1, 2018  Show citation