The first train arrived in Brno on 3 July 1839 along a branch line of the Emperor Ferdinand Northern Railway, built mainly to connect the imperial capital of Vienna with Galicia. The railway’s arrival in the city marked a significant turning point in its history and was followed by economic, industrial, social and artistic development. The relatively small building of the main train station (later known as the ‘upper station’) was designed in the Neo-Classical style by Anton Jüngling. It stood roughly where Fuchs’s post office stands today, meaning on the fringe of the historical city centre. Over the following decades, other railway companies built lines to the station as well, including the State Railway Company, which operated a service to Prague via Třebová. A shared station was to be created for both main carriers, but in the end Jüngling designed two identical dispatch buildings connected via a central vestibule sometime before 1849.
Over the following twenty years, numerous changes to the railway infrastructure necessitated fundamental changes to the building. The plans for this renovation, drafted by Josef Arnold, laid the foundations for the building we know today. The two three-storey dispatch buildings were connected via a lower entrance hall crowned by a rectangular clock tower. The station’s ground plan, which followed the slight curve described by rails, reached all the way to the viaduct over Křenová Street to the north and was adjoined by warehouses and other operational buildings of the Ferdinand Railway to the south. (The State Railway Company used the area of today’s ‘old’ bus station by the Grand Hotel for its operations.) The building’s facades were characterized by the sober Neo-Classical design typical of Arnold. Nevertheless, even this updated building proved incapable of handling the station’s growing traffic, and so it was further expanded in 1903–1904 according to plans by Franz Uhl and Johann Oehm, two architects from the State Railway Company. This remodelling project, realized by the construction company of Josef Nebehosteny, was associated with the connection of a new railway line to Střelice (which offered an alternative route to Vienna) and the construction of platforms and a pedestrian underpass.
The remodelling project saw the application of a distinctive Art Nouveau design onto a Neo-Classical body, an approach that is most evident on the two lateral wings. The central entrance hall has a monumental entrance facade with two pairs of columns topped by sculptures celebrating the railroad. Originally, there were two rectangular clock towers by their sides, but southern tower was damaged during bombing at the end of the Second World War and was never restored. Intricate Art Nouveau decoration similarly dominated the station’s interiors, including the high-ceilinged entrance hall connecting the wings of the former railway companies. Next to the viaduct across Křenová Street, a rectangular new restaurant building featured a spacious dining room on the upper floor. One of Brno’s most prestigious Art Nouveau spaces of its era, this building was long home to a popular restaurant, which at the turn of the 20th century was run by Charlotte Lichtenstern. Since a 2022 renovation, however, it has (wholly inappropriately) been used by a chain chemist shop. Although the station’s most recent renovation restored some of the interiors in the northern wing, an out-of-context new glass building erected in front of the station on the former restaurant terrace has significantly disrupted its uniform character.
The main station was used by both passenger and freight trains. Consequently, various warehouses were built near the railway tracks, one of which sold high-quality Karviná coal. A functionalist post office built by Bohuslav Fuchs in 1937–1940 was strategically located right next to the station building for transporting post by train. After a change in ownership, the current fate of this building remains uncertain. A not widely known fact is that Fuchs designed the post office in such a way that it could be dismantled and moved to a new station.
After the nationalization and unification of the country’s various railways in 1907–1909, the dysfunctional character of this transport hub became fully apparent, and the building and its surroundings have been a frequent subject of urban planning and transportation studies over the past more than one hundred years. The first planning competition was announced by the city in 1927, with submissions restricted to citizens of Czechoslovakia. No winner was announced, but the ‘Tangenta’ design by Peňáz, Fuchs and Sklenář, which envisaged moving the station further to the south, took second place. One early argument in favour of this solution was the fact that the station and the railway tracks kept the city from expanding southward. Nevertheless, in 1942 the city’s zoning department drafted plans for the station’s renovation and expansion in its existing location, with only a slight shift to the south. Plans for the station’s more significant transformation or its relocation have remained unfulfilled to this day, although a winning architectural project was selected several years ago, along with a new location on the site of the lower station (known in the past as Brno-dolní and Rosické nádraží). As a result, the land designated for the station’s relocation is either lying fallow or being used, among other things, for temporary structures and used car dealerships. A similar fate is currently being endured by the cheerless area around the city’s public transport hub in front of the station.
Matěj Kruntorád