As the head of the Stavoprojekt studio, Brno architect Miroslav Spurný had been working on the massive project to construct a hospital complex in Bohunice since the mid-1960s. The undeveloped area along the main road to Jihlava was to serve as the site for a concentrated health-care facility for the city’s inhabitants and a centre for the education of future doctors and research. Spurný had long specialized in the typology of health centres and hospitals, and therefore, based on his work on earlier projects in Boskovice and Znojmo, he was entrusted with the task of preparing the project for the new university hospital in Brno. Part of this project was a pavilion for gynaecology and obstetrics to be located west of the psychiatry building that had been designed by Zdeněk Kříž and was influenced by ‘the Brussels style’ of the early 1960s.
The gynaecology clinic was completed in 1983 and was the first of the hospital’s specialized medical clinics. In its architectural concept, it forms part of an interconnected unit along with a central building for in-patient wards, which opened six years later. The architect created an elongated building with two main parts separated by a indented floor with an opaque matt glass frontage. The ground floor is set back with a main entrance clad in dark tiles (the same as those in the housekeeping wing of the in-patient unit and its external staircase), above which the golden brown suspended wall of the floors above projects out. The in-patient areas for women and babies were in the upper part of the building, which is characterized by a geometric grid of subtle steel columns bearing the transparent parapets of balconies and brown-hued strips. Spurný’s distinctive hallmarks are evident on the gynaecology pavilion, as he used some of the elements which feature in his other projects. The round tubular staircases with their distinctive vertical windows decorated with light tiles also appear on the Communist Party Committee building on Žerotínvo náměstí, as do the brown-tinted window panes and the bite-shaped aperture on the roof terrace. In front of the building, by the entrance, is the limestone sculpture Matky s dítětem [Mother with Child] by the Brno sculptor Sylva Lacinová, whose sculptures adorn many important post-war architectural projects in the city such as the Hotel International.
The gynaecological and obstetrics pavilion remains in operation as a faculty medical facility more or less in its original form, as designed by the architect Miroslav Spurný in the late 1960s. All the building’s essential spatial qualities, division of space, and architectural details (such as tinted glass window panes, sun screens, and steel grid) have been preserved, including the artistic decoration of Sylva Lacinová. There is a plan to build a new obstetrics complex in the next few years, one that would combine the separate faculty clinics in Obilní trh and Bohunice into one. The building is to be situated close to the Spurný’s original pavilion. However, it remains to be seen whether the architectural design of the new building will meet the same high standards of quality as the original pavilion.
KE
