F. J. Černý’s Tenement House II

The tenement house No. 407 was, along with the corner house No. 349, the very first project designed by Josef Gočár, Jan Kotěra’s pupil. Between 1904 and 1905, Gočár worked in Hradec Králové, where he designed the façade of the tenement house No. 407 located in Magdalény Dobromily Rettigové Street, now Bratří Čapků Street. The builder and owner of the two houses was František Jaroslav Černý. 

During Gočár’s work on the project, another floor was added to the original two-storey terraced house with an eccentric gable, a system of pilasters and rusticwork, and the façade became more vertical, completely changing the street view. The new Art Nouveau façade was designed in an axial symmetry; in the centre, there is an avant-corps with two pointed gables, ornamental balcony railings, and a forged entrance door with a semicircular terminal. A significant feature of the façade is floral sgraffito, a technique used by Kotěra’s pupils in the early 1900s. The ledges above the windows create the plasticity of the façade. The windows on the central avant-corps are divided into halves by a wooden frame and into thirds above the skylights. The balconies drawn on a 1909 postcard were never built. 

The simple layout and structure of the tenement house is still preserved. The house has a saddle roof; the roof frames are traditionally erected in the so-called upright bench: the longitudinal purlins are carried by two columns with struts. In the centre of the house, there is a communication core – a stairwell protruding through the avant-corps from the rectangular layout to the courtyard. On the sides of the stairwell, there are flats. The utility rooms such as the sanitary facilities and kitchen were oriented to the courtyard, while the main living rooms faced the street. Each floor is divided into two residential units. In the basement, there were vaulted rooms serving storage units. 

Ondřej Seďa