The area north of the city centre, the area around Lužánky Park, was an industrial zone with a number of manufacturing plants and factories until the late 1920s. The Brand&L'Huillier engineering works, whose buildings were situated at the lower end of Kotlářská Street, were one of these facilities. The company specialized in the production of sugar refinery and cooling equipment, steam boilers and compressors; however, it merged with the stronger První brněnská strojírna in 1923 as a result of financial problems. The company gradually abandoned the site in Kotlářská Street and, in the late 1920s, the plots were purchased by building companies with plans to build residential buildings. A part of a plot in present-day Burešova Street was purchased by the General Pension Institution, which intended to build its headquarters at the site. The company announced an architectural competition in which the modernist entries presented by Jiří Kroha, Bohuslav Fuchs and Ernst Wiesner were defeated by a more traditional design by Emil Králík, a professor at the Czech University of Technology.
This seven-level building closes a block between Bayerova and Botanická streets and its monumental front represents a dominant counterpoint to the Masaryk Student Home by Bohuslav Fuchs. Emil Králík, in line with his architectural origins rooted in Vienna modernism and neo-Classicism, divided the main facade into the ground-floor base, the framed body of the structure segmented by the grid of the windows and the distinctively plated attic used instead of a cornice. The centrally located glazed entrance with an small overhang added to the overall symmetrical composition of the structure.
The building was used as the headquarters of the Regional Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia from the 1960s and received a roof extension as well as a conference hall whose volume filled the inner tract in 1986. After the revolution of 1989, the building shortly housed the Masaryk University Rector's Office as well as the Institute of Computer Science; it has been the seat of the Supreme Court of the Czech Republic since 1993.
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