In 1912, Jan, Karel and Marie Tichý approached the architect Bohumír František Antonín Čermák to draft plans for an apartment building to replace an older house that had been in their joint possession since 1910. Marie Tichá had owned the property since 1867, Karel Tichý since 1898. Construction was not begun until 1915, however, by which time the property had been acquired by Else and Hugo Fanta. In May 1915, Else Fantová obtained permission to demolish the original building and build a new apartment building along with a one-storey courtyard building. The young beginning architect Bohumír F. A. Čermák had just returned to Moravia after his studies in Vienna, and in the period before the First World War he was an important mediator of contemporary Viennese architecture in Brno. The bilingual Čermák quickly established himself in Brno’s ethnically mixed environment, where he was one of the few architects to work for Czech and German clients alike. The aesthetically refined building is a typical example of the unostentatious elegance of Čermák’s pre-war work, characterized by strict symmetry, perfect harmonic balance and a decorative but pure form. Even today, its facade recalls the period of searching for new forms of expression in the spirit of Otto Wagner’s theories about purpose and beauty, which stood in opposition to the opulent decorativeness of late historicism and Art Nouveau. Within the context of Brno at the time, Čermák’s projects most aptly personified the Wagnerian ideal of the new architecture.
The five-storey apartment building has a vertically composed, symmetrical four-bay facade whose upper storeys are segmented by the use of tall pilaster strips. With their rounded shape, the windows on the first floor and the apron walls on the upper two floors’ central window bays resemble oriels. The frequent use of such a ‘bay window’ motif at the time reflected the era’s admiration for English culture and lifestyle. Oriels or oriel elements can be found in practically all of Čermák’s projects. Another prominent facade element is the balcony with a decorative parapet running the width of the building. In this respect, there are clear similarities with Dušan Jurkovič’s design for Eugen Škarda’s house at Dvořákova 10. The facade’s measured décor makes use of various geometric, floral, anthropomorphic and zoomorphic elements. The protruding stepped cornice sits atop a set of distinctive corbels with reliefs of lion heads, a motif that Čermák also applied to his other Brno buildings. Čermák designed the large cinema hall on the ground floor using reinforced concrete, a cutting-edge building technology at the time. Else Fantová applied for a cinema license on 12 July 1913 and received approval on 18 December 1918. During its existence from 1918 to 1935, the Bio Universum cinema was the largest and most modern cinema in Brno and showed an almost exclusively Czech program. It was equipped with sound in 1929, making it the first cinema in Moravia to show the new talkies. In 1927‒1929, the building also housed the studio of Brno’s Radiojournal, the country’s second-oldest broadcasting station after Prague. Else Fantová went bankrupt in late 1935, her assets were placed in receivership, and in 1936 the building and cinema became the property of the main creditor, Anglobanka, which leased it to the Moravia cinema operator. That same year, the ground floor and cinema underwent a modernist renovation designed by Jindřich Kumpošt. In 1936–1948 the cinema operated as the Bio Metro, and in 1949–1953 it was known as the Morava. Films continued to be screened here until 1953, when the building came under the management of the State Theatre’s Mahen Drama Ensemble. The architect Bohdan Lacina converted the auditorium into a theatre venue, and subsequently, from 1 January 1954, it was used by the Mrštík Brothers Theatre. The building has been home to the Brno Municipal Theatre since the early 1990s, when the interior was newly adapted to the theatre’s needs according to plans by Miroslav Melena, who also designed the current ground-floor facade with its semi-circular marquee. In 2004, a new music stage by architects Roman Mach and Jozef Kubín was built in the courtyard.
Pavla Cenková
