This remarkable authentically preserved house on Vaškova Street is an example of sophisticated city housing for the Czech middle class that demonstrates the stylistic transition from late Art Nouveau to a very distinctive modernism.
The house was built and apparently also designed by master mason Václav Lefner of Židenice for his relative, the civil servant Antonín Lefner. Built during the First World War, it was the first new building on the recently laid-out Vaškova Street. In the first half of the 1920s, during the construction boom after Czechoslovak independence and the creation of Greater Brno, Václav Lefner built almost all the houses on this street, and he himself lived at Vaškova 11. Unfortunately, his house was hit by a bomb and destroyed at the end of the Second World War, and when it was rebuilt, only a fragment of the original entrance portal was left.
Antonín and Marie Lefner’s two-storey family house has a richly articulated four-bay street front. The left part has just one storey, the central section is two storeys high and the right-hand side, though also two storeys in height, is slightly lower. This right side of the building is accentuated by a massive arched recessed portal and, above it, a deep loggia protected by an overhanging roof with a coffered soffit. At the rear of the loggia, whose rounded balcony is defined by square openings in its parapet, is a wall of small square glass panels set in a wooden grid, with a door leading to a stair hall inside. The facade is vertically articulated by a giant order of pilasters, and the modernist pediments above the top-floor windows contain layered rectangular cassettes and fluted rectangles in sunken fields. The first-floor apron walls are decorated with a flower basket motif – a nostalgic Neo-Classical element that also appears on other late Art Nouveau buildings in Brno. Other prominent elements are the protruding profiled crown cornice and the tall hipped roof that, combined with the giant order of pilasters, emphasizes the verticality of the building’s central part and its overall silhouette.
The house stands out for its pronounced division of volumes and Neo-Classical expression complemented by elements of geometric modernism, such as the repetitive use of various rectangular elements, the division of the glass panes on the doors and windows, the patterns on the apron walls, etc. Classicist historicism and Art Nouveau are represented by the pilaster order and floral reliefs. The building is a perfect example of a small urban family house, built for a member of the newly emerging Czech middle class. Buildings of this type often reflect a clear desire for status representation, though within the limits of essentially modest economic means. At the same time, the restrained, modernist style is a visible expression of ‘Czechness’. All these intentions came together to produce a unique synthesis of traditional historicist elements reflecting position and status (someone important lives here, and we want people to know) with modernist motifs that proclaimed allegiance to Czech identity at a time of growing faith in the fulfilment of the ideals of the new and humanistic Czech society.
The house was built with concrete ceilings, at the time a technological innovation for single-family houses, and for this reason the Židenice building authority requested its structural assessment. In 1928, the Židenice municipality was engaged in proceedings with the building’s owner regarding his obligation to build a sidewalk in front of his house – it would seem that the current sidewalk is the original one, laid by Antonín Lefner himself. The facade décor and some of the doors and windows are original as well.
Pavla Cenková