The remarkable corner building is a dominant feature on the busy intersection of Francouzská, Vranovská and Cejl Streets. It was built in 1911, apparently by the Brno builder Franz Gokorsch, who also built several other houses in the vicinity. The facades of this demanding new build, which defined the character of the entire surrounding area, were designed by the architect Bohumír František Antonín Čermák.
The six-storey building with commercial spaces on the ground floor and housing on the upper floors, consists of two wings that come together at a rounded corner topped by an attic and a turret-like superstructure. It was built on a large corner plot on the site of an older house with an inn. The older building’s appearance, with an arcade facing Cejl Street, is captured in period drawings and photographs. Čermák’s design is reflective of his early work and may well have been his first commission of this kind in Brno. It was very distinctly inspired by Viennese architecture, in particular the work of Josef Hoffmann. On both wings’ complexly composed street elevations, a balanced set of verticals and horizontals divides the facades into smooth fields decorated only with understated ornamentation in the style of the Vienna Secession’s more classicist stream. Both elevations are finished by distinctive arched gables and a frieze-like cornice. The large surfaces of the gables are smooth, broken up by just a single window, framed in a subtle décor of geometric festoons. The apron walls on the rest of the facade are decorated with slightly protruding ovals inside sunken rectangular fields. Čermák was fond of this approach to the apron walls, again inspired by the work of Josef Hoffmann (such as the home of the Beer-Hofmann family and the villa of Eduard Ast on Vienna’s Hohe Warte), and applied it repeatedly in his pre-war realizations. Like the pilaster strips that frame some of the window bays, the geometric composition of sunken rectangular fields was a response to early modernist and Cubist architecture.
The various floors were connected via three sets of stairs, with the main staircase located in the rounded corner with stained-glass windows. This stained glass and the stair railings were probably designed by Čermák as well.
The valuable corner building is an excellent example of the classicist line of Secessionist and early modernist architecture as exemplified by Josef Hoffmann and the Wiener Werkstätte. In this style, which Čermák innovatively introduced to Brno, a basic simple form is enlivened by the sparing use of geometric décor and subtle colour design. Fine metalwork elements, such as balcony railings with early modernist ornament, have an artistic appeal of their own and are typical features of Čermák’s architectural language. Within this context, it is interesting to note the stylistic contrast between Čermák’s modestly elegant apartment building and Franz Gokorsch’s nearby house at Vranovská 4 (B165). Although both were apparently constructed by Gokorsch, they represent opposite stylistic poles of the late Art Nouveau.
The building was renovated after 2000, although some of the ornamental details on the facades were simplified in the process.
Pavla Cenková
