The triumvirate of neighbouring apartment buildings on Helfertova Street designed by the Brno builder Franz Pawlu is an important example of the neighbourhood’s historical architecture. The buildings at nos. 3 and 5 were built in 1907, and no. 7 was completed in 1908. Pawlu initially owned the new buildings but sold them later.
The buildings fall into Franz Pawlu’s later work from after 1906, when he was turning away from the radical Art Nouveau of his previous period and returning to historicist forms. Nevertheless, the apartment buildings on Helfertova Street can be considered the proverbial exception that confirms the rule, in the sense that in the context of Pawlu’s work, they are an exceptionally progressive and architecturally high-quality development in which he abandoned the previous strictly symmetrical arrangement of the facades and moved towards a style possessing elements of historicism, geometric Art Nouveau and modernism. It is likely that Pawlu was inspired by the work of Maxim Monter or Vladimír Fischer, who used similar asymmetrical compositions with irregularly placed windows and various volumetric arrangements.
The three-storey apartment buildings have a similar composition, with a four-bay street-facing elevation horizontally divided into three zones: a socle zone, a two-storey bel étage and a top floor. Although this design preserves the traditional palace scheme, it is very muted. All three facades are richly articulated by the use of differently shaped oriels, balconies, loggias and gables. The compositions work with irregularly distributed windows of various shapes and sizes. Another common feature is the experimentation with asymmetry, which is repeated both in the basic arrangement and in details such as the balcony railings and ornamentation. The Art Nouveau décor is highly stylized and geometrized and is accompanied by ceramic elements and golden or coloured glass. The facade of Helfertova 3 experiments the most with asymmetry while most strongly integrating modernist impulses – as among other things reflected by the asymmetrical shape of the balconies, which are rounded on one side but end in a rectangular balustrade on the other. Helfertova 5 is notable for its decorative detail of golden circles, which are used individually above the ground-floor windows but on the floor above are grouped together in fans resembling peacock feathers. The stuccowork on Helfertova 7 revisits more historicist motifs, with wreaths or classicist vases alternating with large numbers of festoons and inset multicoloured glass reminiscent of jewelled garlands. The wide range of shapes and the abundance of decoration give the buildings a striking visual diversity without impairing the coherence of the whole. The front gardens of nos. 3 and 7 are still enclosed in Art Nouveau wrought-iron fences.
Pavla Cenková
