Avion Hotel

Miroslav Kostelecký, a restaurant owner, decided to modernize his restaurant in Česká Street in 1926 and had a new hotel designed by Bohuslav Fuchs built in place of a former ground-floor inn. The architect had to deal with the extremely narrow, originally medieval parcel (8 x 34 m). Fuchs use of a ferro-concrete skeleton resulted in remarkable spatial effects in the interior.
The street facade is lightened by the large windows and light ceramic and opaxite cladding. The central entrance to the café, skirted by the cylindrical display windows of the hotel's restaurant and reception area, is situated underneath the Avion Hotel logo by Emanuel Hrbek. The café was situated on the first and second floor and is highlighted by a  horizontal, two-level oriel. Its space connected by the rounded bulk of the staircase is segmented by galleries and different levels of floors and ceilings. Fuchs adopted this vertical mingling of spaces from Le Corbusier. The spatial diversity was also enhanced by mirror walls and light coming in through the large windows and glass block skylights. The upper stories, retracted away from the street so they do not disrupt the uniform height of adjacent buildings, house forty hotel rooms accessible via a separate staircase; the top floor housed the hotel owner's apartment with a terrace. Although the hotel, café and restaurant are three separately accessible units, their service facilities are interconnected.The Avion Hotel, owing to its sophisticated structural design, inspired a number of Fuchs' contemporaries (e.g. the Juli Hotel in Prague designed by Pavel Janák  in 1933). Though the building was granted landmark status as early as the 1960s, this failed to prevent the devastation of the original furnishings of the interiors, which continued to fall into disrepair throughout the 1990s. Architect Eva Jiřičná recently presented a project for the reconstruction of the hotel; up for sale, the fate of the hotel is now uncertain.