In the autumn of 1904, real estate and umbrella factory owner Gustav Weiss and his wife Anna submitted an application to the city council for permission to build a five-storey residential building with a commercial ground floor on the site of their older house at Ferdinandsgasse 9 (today Masarykova Street). Although the unknown architect designed a traditional symmetrical palace facade, he gave it certain original touches and, abandoning the historicist approach to volumetric composition, made use of the radical forms of geometric Art Nouveau.
The building has a distinctively structured street facade with rich ornamental decoration. Its dominant vertical feature is a centrally placed three-sided oriel spanning three floors, with a balcony terrace on the top floor enclosed by an ornamental wrought-iron railing mounted between low masonry pillars. Above the oriel, the cornice is split in half by a dynamically undulating gable with window-like apertures done in an organic Art Nouveau style. Horizontally, the facade’s main elements are the two second-floor balconies on either side of the oriel, which are held up by large corbels and bounded by similar railings as the one on the top floor. The facade was visually articulated using sections of cornice, window pediments, apron walls with lambrequin plasterwork, and rusticated pilaster strips, complemented by plentiful relief decoration, most often of various geometric shapes but also of stylized cords with tassels or motifs of coins and flowers.
The building remained in the hands of the Weiss family long after the death of Gustav Weiss in 1918. Anna Weissová is documented as living at the address as late as in the 1930s. In 1935, the ground-floor commercial premises were given a new facade made of glass, stainless steel and black opaxite done in elegant forms according to plans by Ernst Wiesner, who also designed the interiors of the two shops located in the building: Arnold Lassmann’s men’s fashions and Gustav Weiss’s sales outlet.
The neighbouring building is the renowned modernist apartment building built in 1906 for Stephan Haupt von Buchenrode according to plans by Leopold Bauer. The decoratively elaborate architecture of Weiss’s Art Nouveau building forms a remarkably synergistic counterpart to Bauer’s distinctive forms.
Aleš Homola