In 1902, the Viennese architect Eugen Fassbender won the competition for a new master plan for the city of Brno. The plan defined the form taken by the development of entire suburbs, including the area around Lužánky Park – today’s Drobného Street, at the time connotatively called Parkstrasse and later named Sadová in Czech. The local sloping (and above all lucrative) land was bought by the architect and builder Franz Pawlu and his family’s company, and he subsequently built a luxurious apartment building called Belvedere here. Pawlu’s son Arnold built up the opposite side of today’s Erbenova Street.
As with the Tivoli complex on Konečného náměstí, Pawlu here took on an extremely important urban space and developed it in the vein of contemporary Viennese and Parisian projects. The design of the facades is a typical example of his later work, in which he applied fading echoes of Art Nouveau to a Neo-Baroque building volume topped with a richly variegated mansard roof. The house is characterized by the abundant use of balconies that follow the outline of the building in picturesque curves while offering views of the park and the distant panorama of the city centre. Other surviving elements besides the facades are the interior stuccowork and joinery decoration, concentrated mainly in the common areas of the stairs and corridors.
The Neo-Baroque apartment building with its large, sculpted mass was not a solitary building with no relationship to its surroundings. Quite the opposite, in fact. Immediately after completion, a café and restaurant operated on the ground floor, where they made use of the terrace on the corner opposite the park. Together with a general store and a dairy, the upper-middle-class residents of the generously designed apartments enjoyed numerous necessary amenities. The building was mainly home to German-speaking and Jewish families who worked in banking, law or government services. After the Second World War, the building was degraded to a hostel and offices; later it operated as a hotel, and today it is again used for residential purposes.
Matěj Kruntorád
