The former village of Bohunice dates back to the 13th century, when it existed in the area today demarcated by the prefabricated apartment blocks on Rolnická and Spodní Streets. To the east, towards Horní Heršpice, a road ran down past the fertile lands known as Nivky, where today the gardens along Lány Street extend all the way to the Leskava River. It is these lands that the Czech Institute of Pomology, founded in 1900, selected for its headquarters. The institute had broken away from the German Chamber of Commerce as a Czech-language institution with the goal of providing education in the field of agriculture, in particular horticulture, vegetable growing, the care of ornamental plants and associated processing industries. Although the institute’s members, among them its director František Suchý, published textbooks and manuals on crop cultivation, its main purpose of was practical teaching. The newly acquired land was soon transformed into school gardens, flower beds and greenhouses, and in 1902 the firm of Antonín Müller commenced construction of a school building. Although the plans had been drawn up a year earlier by Antonín Tebich, the drawings of the facades for the planned school and dormitory (never materialized) were also signed by Dušan Jurkovič. Jurkovič had already completed his early, well-known complex at Pustevny in the Beskid Mountains, but the young artist’s architectural career was still in its early stages. The modern main school building, officially opened in 1904, included not only classrooms and offices but also an apartment for the school’s director and student housing.
Inside two main entrances, a corridor leads to the various classrooms and offices, or one can climb a set of stairs with an Art Nouveau railing. The building’s finest feature is its exterior, whose architectural form bears all the hallmarks of Jurkovič’s work, such as gables decorated with motifs inspired by the folk architecture of Moravian Wallachia, influences of which are also present in the dormer windows and canopies above the ground-floor windows. The facades’ articulation is in keeping with the principles of geometric Art Nouveau. A farm building and a fruit drying plant were built at the same time as the main building, and the entire compound began to be fully utilized.
Fruit and vegetable production was particularly important during the First World War, when more than 60 greenhouses were built to meet demand. A cannery was built during the First Republic, and other buildings for teaching and agricultural production were added after the Second World War.
In the 1970s and again in 2004, the Bohunice horticultural school was merged with a vocational school in Rajhrad. In 2011, after more than a century of teaching and agricultural production, the school in Bohunice was closed, although the main building is still used for educational purposes. The remaining part of the site belongs to a real estate development company, which is planning to construct apartment buildings on it.
Though a lesser-known work by Tebich and Jurkovič, the former Institute of Pomology is all the more significant because it is the only school building we know of in the Czech Republic to have been built by this architectural duo.
Matěj Kruntorád
