The Czech Technical University in Brno was established on 19 September 1899 and was initially housed in rented premises belonging to the Vesna women’s educational association at today’s Jaselská Street 9. However, the school quickly grew to include other fields, professors and students. The resulting lack of space was solved by renting additional rooms in other school buildings. Nevertheless, as early as April 1900 the school’s professors asked their colleague Michal Ursíny to elaborate an architectural brief for construction of the school’s own building. A graduate of the Czech Technical University in Prague, Ursíny had previously worked as the chief engineer of the city of Zagreb and as an external consultant for the technical university there. He joined the Brno university as a professor in 1900 and served several terms as its dean and rector.
In the autumn of 1900, the school acquired a building plot from the Augustinians on an extension of Veveří Street in the then-undeveloped territory between Brno and the village of Žabovřesky. Subsequently, a building committee was elected whose members included not just Ursíny but also the architect Josef Bertl, a graduate of Prague’s technical university who had recently been appointed professor of civil engineering in Brno and who later served as the school’s dean and rector. Working with Ursíny’s brief, Bertl drafted the first sketches for the project. The initial project (six pavilions and a special building for the mechanical engineering laboratory) was elaborated in May 1903, but the detailed plans were not completed until 1905–1906 by the chief ministerial engineer Karel Donda. For financial reasons, the project’s scope was reduced to three pavilions – a main building plus one pavilion each for the civil and mechanical engineering departments. Construction was begun in the autumn of 1907 and was carried out by the Prague building contractor Václav Nekvasil. The building was ceremonially opened on 25 June 1911, and in March of that year the school was officially named the Imperial and Royal Franz Joseph Czech Technical School in Brno.
Despite the cuts made to the original project, the new buildings were an exceptionally opulent complex reminiscent of a Baroque chateau, with a court of honour and a monumental symmetrical composition centred around the main pavilion, connected by covered first-floor bridges to the identically composed pavilions B and C on either side. Formally, the design was inspired by the radical Czech Baroque, characterized by facades adorned with rich sculptural decoration.
A similarly monumental approach was taken to the vestibule, which included an irregular spherical vault ceiling with lunettes, an anteroom with a trough vault and a triple-flight pillar-supported staircase with a balustrade. Throughout the interior, the walls and pillars are decorated with stucco and clad in faience tiles up to a height of one metre. At the centre of the building on the first floor is a two-storey aula with a dome ceiling constructed using the reinforced-concrete Hennebique System (which was used for the vestibule as well). Besides housing the school’s lecture rooms, rector’s office, drafting studios, laboratories and various institutes, the building also had a library and a photography studio with darkroom, a gallery and drawing studio with overhead lighting above the auditorium, and a gymnasium and fencing room with showers in the basement. Central heating and ventilation, passenger lifts and a lift for books in the library were a matter of course. Behind the main pavilion there originally were a pumping station and a machine room with a 35-five-metre-tall chimney.
The original buildings were deliberately grouped on the front half of the building plot, as the campus was expected to eventually expand towards the foot of Kraví Hora. By the spring of 1914, construction was begun on a new Chemistry Pavilion in the style of the late Theresian Baroque according to plans by Karel Hugo Kepka (completed in 1917). Despite its great urbanist potential, the technical university never became the focal point of one of the planned squares in the Academic Quarter ambitiously envisioned in plans from the 1920s. Instead, during the First World War utilitarian military barracks were erected in front of the school, which were later replaced by a park. In 1925–1928, a mechanical engineering pavilion with a fair-faced brick facade was built in the middle of the plot according to plans by Vladimír Fischer. In 1951–1991, the university had to leave the premises on Veveří Street to make way for the Military Technical Academy, and in the 1950s two new buildings (today buildings E and F) were built on both sides of the mechanical engineering pavilion. The buildings were returned to Brno University of Technology in 1991, and since 1992 they have housed the school’s Faculty of Civil Engineering. In 2010–2013, the area underwent extensive renovation and additional construction according to plans drafted by the Brno-based Arch.Design studio. Among other things, the former Keramoprojekt building (today’s building R and student cafeteria) was added to the original complex, connected to pavilion B by means of a glass footbridge across Rybkova Street. Unfortunately, the original character of the building, designed in the early 1960s by architect Jiří Velek, was completely altered in the process. With completion of a bridge connecting pavilion A with the mechanical engineering pavilion, it is now possible to travel through all of the campus’s buildings without having to go outdoors.
Karolína Králiková