In 1902–1904, František Hudec developed the western stretch of Falkensteiner Avenue (today’s Gorkého Street) with stylistically uniform apartment buildings of his own design (Gorkého 29–35 and Úvoz 74). The facades were covered in Art Nouveau decoration, with architecturally more relief-like elements towards the corner with Úvoz, culminating with the corner building at Gorkého 35, whose facade is broken up by striking vertical motifs underneath female mascarons and a crown cornice with lunettes below and a low arched attic above. The facade thus directly adhered to the programme of the Czech Secession, which combined elements of the Czech Renaissance and Art Nouveau ornament considered to be lyrically Slavic.
After 1906, some of these buildings were used by the Moravian Central Women’s Refuge, founded in 1899 by Eliška Machová with the aim of providing a place ‘where an orphaned or abandoned child, a lonely girl, whether studying or working, a woman without a family hearth or a frail old woman all alone in the world without support could find a safe refuge.’ The shelter’s opening had originally been planned for the 70th birthday of the writer Karolina Světlá in 1900, but her unexpected passing hastened the first shelter’s opening. After spending several years in rented premises on today’s Křížová Street, in 1906 the association took out a lease on Hudec’s corner building on Gorkého, which it later purchased. The building soon proved unable to keep up with the shelter’s expanding services, and so the association also rented the neighbouring building at no. 33 directly from Hudec and his wife Jarmila.
The corner building initially functioned solely as a girls’ orphanage, while the neighbouring building (purchased in 1927) served as a boarding house, mainly for young village girls seeking domestic work in Brno, poor widows, and retired members of the association. The refuge, in which Marie Steyskalová was significantly involved for many decades, offered more than accommodations. Among other things, the association organized hiking trips, handicraft courses, a puppet theatre run by the daughter of the composer Leoš Janáček, Olga, and folk and cultural events. Over the years, the group ran many other shelters and sanatoria, not only in Brno, but throughout Moravia. It even built a children’s sanatorium in Crikvenica on the Croatian coast. The association’s activities were suppressed during the Second World War, and it was dissolved in the early 1950s. Today, the buildings of the former women’s shelter are used by as a dormitory for secondary school students.
The achievements of Eliška Machová and Marie Steyskalová, two of the association’s key figures, are commemorated by a relief plaque with their likenesses that was installed on the building’s corner in 1952. It was made by the artist Sylva Jílková-Lacinová according to a design by her brother Lubor Lacina.
Matěj Kruntorád