Experimental apartment building

D194

In the framework of a first nationwide experimental project, two experimental designs were built in Brno: an apartment building on Vinařská street and a residential complex on Křídlovická street, both of which were co-authored by František Zounek, who was, at that time, an employee of the State Design Institute for the Constructions of Towns and Villages. The design of the first Brno experiment was the result of a public tender announced by Josef Šimek, director of the national company Pozemní stavby, in the daily newspaper Rovnost in 1958. The moderately proportioned four-storey building was situated in mature gardens in an attractive locality with  villas  from the nineteenth century and the interwar period that was known at that time as Jiráskův čtvrt (today’s Masarykova čtvrt). Its purpose was to explore the possibilities of using cast concrete technology. The execution documentation was prepared in the design department of Pozemní stavby in cooperation with the development department of a company with that had had experience of a project for a similar building in Bratislava.

 

The building was designed in two sections with thirteen flats as a box construction with load-bearing transverse walls of cast concrete and cast-in-situ flat slab floors of reinforced concrete with a short span. The main purpose of the project was to develop more versatility in the orientation of buildings and the height variability of housing developments with the technology used (up to eight floors), and to improve the habitability of apartments by increasing the number of rooms or by using various technological construction methods and materials. It was also necessary to improve the aesthetic aspect of the living environment, while, at the same time, complying with the prescribed budget for housing units. Thus, economic prudence was an important starting point, as noted in period texts emphasizing the significant reduction in the consumption of building materials. The Zounek and Rudiš design was also presented as an example of radical material savings in an exhibition at Brno House of Arts entitled Ten Years of Housing and Civic Construction in the Work of the Regional Design Institute in Brno.

 

Considerable attention was paid to the building not only in terms of the technology used, but also from the perspective of the newly formulated housing policy of the state, as it was one of the first examples of cooperative construction in Brno. The building went into service in March 1960, and in October of the following year, two more cooperative buildings of ‘the Zounek type’, as the press of that time referred to them, were being finished on the same street, with twenty-seven residential units (also made of cast concrete with masonry filling, but with a different layout). In 1961, three more buildings of the same type were under construction in Žabovřesky on the streets Mučednická, Hvězdárenská and Zábranského. However, the plan to build fifty-four Zounek-type housing units on Tábor street, which was conditional on permission to build the administrative building of the Regional Association of National Construction Enterprises, i.e., the organization to which the apartment buildings would belong, ultimately never materialized.

 

The high architectural quality of this first experimental building in Brno is also evidenced by the fact that it featured not only in periodicals such as Architektura ČSR, Československý architekt and Domov and in publications devoted to contemporary Czechoslovak architecture, but even in the corporate magazine of Pozemní stavby, which due to its operational, technical and political propaganda focus usually paid little attention to the visual appearance of buildings. The employees of Pozemní stavby Brno assumed that the prototype would be put into serial production, but immediately after it was built it was found that the building’s parameters did not meet the effective norms, as it used non-unified spans of 400 cm. However, these norms were only introduced after the buildings had been designed and also affected the other two experimental constructions being built at the same time, a cast concrete building in Prague-Bubeneč by the architect Václav Havránek and a panel building in Hradec Králové by František Steiner.
 

 

 

Name
Experimental apartment building

Date
1958 – 1959

Architects
František Zounek, Viktor Rudiš

Trail
Excursion: Stránice 1946–1989

Code
D194

Type
Apartment building

Address
Vinařská 354, 408 / 24, 42, (Pisárky), Brno, Střed

Public transport
Výstaviště – vstup G2 (TRAM 1)

GPS
49°11'34.2"N 16°34'52.8"E

Literature
Jindřich Chatrný, Experimenty z cihel a betonu v Brně na „nábřeží řeky Svratky“, Brno v minulosti a dnes, 2015, p. 391–424
Markéta Žáčková, Od „nearchitektury“ k experimentu, Na prahu zítřka. Brněnská architektura a vizuální kultura období socialismu / On the Threshold of Tomorrow. Architecture and Visual Culture in Brno during the Communist Era, 2014, p. 173–184
Markéta Žáčková, Byl sice jistý plán… Výzkumný ústav výstavby a architektury a experimentální bytová výstavba počátku 60. let 20. století, Sešit pro umění, teorii a příbuzné zóny, 2014
Eva Novotná, Jak dál s panelákem? Experimenty v bytové výstavbě z let 1959–1961, Beton: technologie – konstrukce – sanace, 2013
Jaromír Houdek, Dům z litého betonu, Pozemstav buduje , 1959
Roman Pochop, Několik poznámek k řešení pokusných bytových domů v Praze, Hradci Králové a Brně, Architektura ČSR , 1960, p. 520–527
František Kalivoda (ed.), Deset let bytové a občanské výstavby v práci Krajského projektového ústavu v Brně (kat. výst.), Brno 1958
Jaromír Houdek, Prototyp z litého betonu, Pozemní stavby, 1960, p. 464
Jiří Šála, Milan Machatka, Tepelně technické vady a poruchy panelových budov a jejich sanace, Brno – Praha 2002
Oldřich Dostál, Vítězslav Procházka, Josef Pechar, Moderní architektura v Československu, Praha 1967
Kolektiv autorů, Tady se bude pěkně bydlet! , Pozemstav buduje , 1959
Jaroslav Doškář, Rozhodný krok vpřed: Stavbaři mají vlastní bytové družstvo, Pozemstav buduje , 1959
Jaroslav Doškář, Nové domy našich družstevníků, Pozemstav buduje , 1961
Ervín Trmač, Chcete bydlet?, Pozemstav buduje , 1961


Sources
Šárka Svobodová, Masarykova čtvrť, Brněnský architektonický manuál, dostupné z: http://www.bam.brno.cz/stezka/4-masarykova-ctvrt, vyhledáno 11. 11. 2014
Usnesení ústředního výboru Komunistické strany Československa k řešení bytového problému v ČSR do roku 1970, Rudé právo XXXIX, 1959, č. 66, 8. 3., Ústav pro českou literaturu AV ČR. Digitalizovaný archiv časopisů, dostupné z: archiv.ucl.cas.cz/index.php?path=RudePravo/1959/3/8/3.png, vyhledáno 10. 10. 2017
https://pamatkovykatalog.cz/experimentalni-typovy-dum-v-brne-18340994