Zprávy památkové péče 2020, 80(2):147-165 | DOI: 10.56112/zpp.2020.2.02

From the city to the suburbs. Residential construction in Brno-Královo Pole in the years 1919-1925

Pavla Cenková, Aleš Homola

NPÚ, ÚOP v Brně

In a series of professional articles entitled "My Home is My Castle", we focus on the formation and form of residential construction in the Brno suburbs in the first half of the 1920s. While the last study dealt with the construction of the Brno district of Žabovřesky, the current article is devoted to the urban creation of Královo Pole, the most important of the Brno suburbs in the first years of the existence of Greater Brno. As in Žabovřesky, the stimulating and supporting measures of the first Czechoslovak Republic toward housing construction had a fundamental influence on the boom in construction activity in the early 1920s. The context of the construction, however, was significantly different. Královo Pole, promoted to a municipality in 1905, conceptually developed its new district west of the backbone of Palackého třída in the structure of the position and regulation plan from 1904, at least since the second decade of the 20th century in the contours of grandiose metropolitan buildings. After the end of the First World War, Královo Pole solved the catastrophic housing shortage by undertaking housing construction itself, actively shaping the new district around the central Slovanské náměstí. The generous spaces, delimited by similarly generous architecture, were supposed to create an ideal urban environment in which the belief in social progress was combined with Czech patriotism, strengthened after 1918 by the ethos of the young nation led by Masaryk. However, the construction situation in the district was largely influenced by the pioneering and far-reaching construction activity of the local Public Benefit Construction Cooperative which replaced the absence of a large development investor which would accelerate the area's construction boom.
In the first half of the 1920s, residential architecture in Královo Pole took the form of an original amalgam of modernism and classicizing design. This defining traditional architectural current evolved organically from the pre-war early modernist and Secessionist chapter of architectural creation in Královo Pole and showed significant resistance to avant-garde functionalist modernism, which no longer made any headway in the considerably built-up area of Královo Pole. In the first four decades of the 20th century, the buildings in Královo Pole were generally characterized by above-standard architectural quality. Immediately from the beginning of the 1920s, new buildings were built here on the projects of important architects such as Jindřich Kumpošt, Miloš Laml, Jaroslav Grunt, Miloslav Kopřiva, and Oskar Poříska. At the end of the 1920s and in the 1930s, this development was supplemented by functionalist buildings by Josef Polášek and Bohuslav Fuchs. In addition to the well-known names of Brno's interwar modernism, lesser-known creators such as Karel Láník and Josef Novák in particular played an important role in the appearance of Královo Pole in the first Czechoslovak Republic.

Keywords: interwar architecture, Brno, 1920s, residential construction, Královo Pole

Published: June 1, 2020  Show citation