František Bartoš

František Bartoš was born on 3 January 1894. In 1924–1927, he studied at Josef Gočár’s studio at the Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture, Technical University in Prague. In the 1920s, he took part in architectural competitions and designed several buildings in Prague. The most significant ones include the Institute of Hydrology no. 219 in Prague – Bubeneč, where he professed to Gočár’s purist style using unplastered brickwork, and a warehouse in Holešovice port. Until 1926, Bartoš was as a professor at a technical school in Prague. Together with Karel Seifert, he took part in the competition for the crematorium at Vyšehrad [1]. Since the late 1920s, he worked in Hradec Králové where he designed a purely functionalist tenement house no. 847 for lawyer František Steinfeld. According to contemporary press, it was a completely new type of tenement house with plenty of light and of space in luxurious flats [2]. After World War II, Bartoš worked as a town planner in Hradec Králové. During the so-called biennials plan in 1947–1948, he collaborated with Josef Havlíček and designed a housing estate later called Gottwaldova čtvrť (Gottwald District), today Labská kotlina I. In the design, Bartoš and Havlíček used the avant-garde concept of terraced buildings, including originally designed amenities and cultural houses that were not eventually built; the housing estate was completed in the 1950s in the spirit of socialist realism. Between 1945 and 1950, Bartoš also worked on a new zoning plan with Josef Havlíček, creating a regional and infrastructural agglomeration of Hradec Králové and Pardubice. “If the industrial areas of the two cities could evolve as zone housing estates moving towards each other, within a few decades, we could perhaps have a structure of two connected historic centres merged into one urban complex,” explained the architects [3]. These plans, however, were thwarted by Bartoš’s untimely death on 26 February 1949.  

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