“In the difficult conditions of wartime and after the fire, I was forced to rebuild the factory completely – without a technical director, as I disagreed with him on a number of issues of a professional nature.”
Viktor Bauer, Co jsem prožil u nás od převratu [What I’ve Been Through in This Country since the Coup], Brno 1929, p. 8.
“Yesterday afternoon, a beam fell on the leg of 37-year-old bricklayer Václav Boček, employed on the construction of the sugar factory in Hrušovany, and broke his femur.”
Úrazy při práci [Working Accidents], Lidové noviny [The People’s Newspaper] XXIV, No. 100, 11 April 1916 (morning edition), p. 2.
The establishment of a sugar refinery in Hrušovany u Brna dates back to the early 1880s. The main factory building was built between 1881–1882 by the local railway and was operated by the joint-stock company Rohrbacher Zuckerraffinerie Actien-Gesellschaft. The company’s operations were connected with the neighbouring sugar factory in Židlochovice, owned by the Robert family. After the fire that destroyed the Old Brno sugar factory in 1906, Viktor Bauer Sr. became financially involved in Hrušovany. After his death, he was replaced on the company’s board of directors by his son Viktor, who in 1913 moved the company’s headquarters to Vienna. It was probably there that he contacted the architect Adolf Loos, who designed the director’s villa for the Hrušovany refinery in the same year, and also furnished the new Viennese office. At that time, though, Viktor Bauer Jr. and his family were living mainly in Dresden, where he had bought a villa in the Loschwitz district a year earlier and had it furnished with furniture that was also recommended by Loos.
On 12 November 1915, the Austro-Hungarian press reported that a devastating fire had engulfed the Hrušovany refinery the day before. The Národní listy daily provided a detailed report: “We have learnt more details about the fire at the refinery in Hrušovany. The fire, which could be seen from as far as the Špilberk Castle in Brno, spread so fast that the workers and 400 Russian prisoners who were working in the sugar factory couldn’t save anything but their very lives. Numerous fire brigades came together, a fire engine arrived from Brno, and a special train brought a steam one as well, but extinguishing the fire was out of the question, all the action being limited to defending the surrounding factory buildings and the nearby railway station, which was also endangered. Only the main five-storey building burnt down, the damage caused by the fire is estimated at one million crowns, but is covered by insurance. There was six million crowns worth of raw sugar in the warehouse. The fire lasted until two o’clock in the morning. The storekeeper Šotek has been missing and it is quite probable that he perished in the fire. It has not been possible to access the fire site yet, as the wreckage is still burning.” The damage caused by the fire was alarming, one storekeeper was tragically killed in the flames, and the main five-storey factory building with the filter tower burnt to the ground. Fortunately, the company was insured with the Insurance Association of the Sugar Industry in Prague and the losses were covered. As the then-director of the refinery, Viktor Bauer Jr. went to the site to document the consequences of the fire and organize the construction of a new main building. A building permit application was submitted on 25 March 1916, and in 1917 the final inspection of a part of the new building was carried out.
The new three-storey building in reinforced concrete with hundreds of windows and an asymmetrically placed filter tower, with seven floors and a height of 36 meters, remains an impressive construction today. The monumentality of the 130-meter-long building is enhanced by the design of the main façade with a row of half-columns set between the window panels and reaching up to the height of the third floor, where they are finished with a massive cornice. The roofing of the main factory hall with a huge protruding skylight is a technological miracle. The individual floors have the character of an open space rhythmised by a regular network of reinforced concrete pillars. To do the construction work, Bauer commissioned the German company Max Gotthilf Richter, Kammerling & Co. that operated in Leipzig, with branches in Dresden and Chemnitz. It specialized mainly in technologically complex reinforced concrete structures, such as bridges, viaducts and factories.
Although the rebuilt refinery was one of the most modern enterprises of its kind in Europe from the point of view of the sugar industry, after 1923 the company was hit by the severe consequences of Masaryk’s land reform. First the company lost beet fields in Židlochovice, and after repeated attempts to buy expensive raw materials on the open market, production was stopped in 1928. Since soon after that, the complex has been used for alternative purposes: initially it housed a feed warehouse, and after the nationalization the premises served the state enterprises Prefa and Svit Gottwaldov.
The refinery building has been attributed by some experts to Adolf Loos since about the mid-1960s; however, it is absent from the lists of works that were published during the architect’s lifetime. His authorship might be supported by Loos’ repeated engagement in Hrušovany as well as by the formal design of the main façade, with a row of half-columns inserted between the windows. This element was used by the architect on the garden façade of a family house in Jiráskova Street in Brno, the reconstruction of which he designed in 1909. However, newly discovered sources provide surprising information: the factory was designed by Stephan & Möbius, a lesser-known studio from Dresden. Architect Carl Ernst Stephan and his partner Ernst Möbius designed several private houses located in the local district of Loschwitz, where Viktor Bauer and his family lived during the fire. Their authorship is confirmed by an extensive article published in 1918 in the professional journal Der Industriebau. Although it may now seem that this resolves the question of the authorship of the Hrušovany refinery, the opposite is true: a postcard with a photograph of the factory deposited in the Albertina in Vienna bears a note by Adolf Loos, written in his own hand: “Nach Plänen von Loos [According to Loos’ design].” For the sake of order it should be pointed out that the architect used to talk about himself in the third person and that since it is a postcard, the caption may refer to the town of Hrušovany as such.
Jana Kořínková