‘The architect Dušan Jurkovič (…) has built a family house for himself in the Imperial Forest near Brno, which he has put on display with all its furnishings, thus offering the best lesson on how modern man should live. It is like a gingerbread house. (…) It introduces into this beautiful corner of Brno the charm of Slavic poetry, expressed through the originality of a Slavic artist. It has been functionally laid out, with no unnecessary spaces; instead, every corner is enlivened with a special intimacy.’ Such was the description of Jurkovič’s house by an unknown architect (probably Josef Merhaut) in an extensive article published in Moravská orlice on Sunday, 26 August 1906. From that day until 20 September, the public could view an exhibition in the newly completed villa titled Dušan Jurkovič: An Exhibition of Architecture and Industrial Art, which showed drawings and photographs of Jurkovič’s buildings alongside works by several other artists. The exhibition was organized by the Club of the Friends of Art, and the main exhibit was the building itself. In this way, the exhibition took an original approach to promoting the principles of modern living and the modern way of life. In its emphasis on two-dimensionality and geometry, Jurkovič’s exhibition poster, which was translated into print by Bohumír Jaroněk, brings to mind Joseph Maria Olbrich’s poster for the Darmstadt Artists’ Colony exhibition in 1901. Even before Jurkovič’s exhibition opened to the public, on 21 August 1906 in Národní listy Karel Elgart-Sokol described his villa as ‘the architect’s newest and freest work’.
The building, the plans for which are dated January 1906, is located in Žabovřesky (incorporated into Greater Brno in 1919) in an area known as Pod Kopcem at the northern foot of the Imperial Forest, today’s Wilson Woods. On 2 September 1905, Jurkovič spent 4,126 crowns to purchase a large plot of land measuring more than 0.37 hectares and extending all the way to present-day Šmejkalova Street. He subsequently subdivided this land and sold off the resulting building plots, on which several family houses were built in 1921–1923. When the exhibition opened in August 1906, his villa’s exteriors, including the garden, were completed, as were the main living room with library, the dining room, the children’s room and the bedrooms on the ground floor, which served as exhibition halls. Jurkovič’s family probably moved in soon after the end of the exhibition, for they were already registered at the address in 1906, although the building’s entry in the land registry is dated somewhat later, 6 September 1907.
Construction was carried out by the Brno builder Antonín Tebich, with whom Jurkovič was linked professionally and by friendship. According to the exhibition catalogue, the companies and craftsmen involved in the building’s construction, including the provision of furniture and furnishings, were almost exclusively from Brno. One of the main building materials besides stone and wood was cork, an unusual material for the time, used in the form of cork panels supplied by Vienna’s Kleiner & Bokmeyer company. The building thus stood out not only for its use of compositional and artistic attributes typical of the English country house (the so-called cottage style), but also thanks to its technical parameters. Jurkovič published this technical information, along with the building’s financial costs and all its floor plans, in the exhibition catalogue and also, a year later, in the prestigious Viennese monthly magazine for the building and decorative arts Der Architekt, where he wrote, ‘The upper building, which stands on a socle made of rubble stone, is built of 15cm-thick half-timbered walls. The masonry infill consisting of a compacted mixture of slag, sand and hydraulic lime is fitted with 4cm-thick outer and 3cm-thick inner cork insulation. The outer cork panels are covered in cement render, the inner panels in gypsum plaster.’ He also described the villa’s layout, which had a caretaker’s flat in the basement and a wine cellar that was accessed from the garden.
The main entrance is from a loggia on the ground floor. Inside are a stair hall with an alcove and a gallery, three rooms, a kitchen and other facilities. Upstairs were two rooms, two studies, a terrace and an attic. Jurkovič described the interiors as simple but elegantly furnished, the facades as smooth due to the use of cork. The price, he wrote, was 35,876 crowns, with the addendum: ‘not counting my work’. One distinctive artistic element was a glass mosaic on the gable of the main elevation decorated with an image from the Slovak fairy tale O báčovi a šiarkanovi (The Shepherd and the Dragon), which had been retold by Božena Němcová and published in 1854 in the almanac Perly české (Czech Pearls). Half a century later, in 1903, the story caught Jurkovič’s attention when it was published in Volné směry with illustrations by Mikoláš Aleš. The mosaic for the villa was designed by Adolf Kašpar and realized by the Brno glassworks of Benedikt Škarda, for whom Jurkovič designed an apartment house with an Art Nouveau facade on Brno’s Dvořákova Street in 1908. Another element with a fairy-tale atmosphere is the entrance gate by the street, the upper half of which is a spoked semicircle with two peacocks with large tails carved into it. The artistic approach to the interiors is most evident in the hall, which was dominated by a copy of Joža Uprka’s painting Z jara (From Spring) done by Antoš Frolka. The walls in the corner beneath the staircase were decorated by a folk painter called Brynzová from the Slovak village of Čataj, and in the alcove were tapestries designed by Rudolf Schlattauer and a statue by Franta Uprka titled Maměnka (Mother). Josef Pekárek’s sculpture Dudák (Bagpiper) stood by the entrance to the hall.
The Jurkovič Villa is an example of the harmonious co-existence of genius loci with the spirit of personality. It perfectly fulfils the concept of a Gesamtkunstwerk, and the inclusion of works by Jurkovič’s artistic friends truly made it a ‘house for an art lover’. As part of a comprehensive renovation project in 2007–2010, the damaged mosaic on the main elevation was replaced with a contemporary artwork by Josef Bolf. The villa is currently managed by the Moravian Gallery, which operates it as a museum of modern architecture and uses it for exhibitions of contemporary design.
Dagmar Černoušková
