Tenement Houses

The tenement house no. 637 on the corner of Čelakovského and K. H. Máchy Streets and the adjacent tenement houses at 638 and 639 Čelakovského Street were probably the greatest projects designed by Jindřich Freiwald and Jaroslav Böhm in Hradec Králové. The design was published in their catalogue titled Naše stavby (Our Buildings). In the triangular gable facing K. H. Máchy Street, there is a triple window with decorative jambs reminiscent of the Cubist morphology used in the tenement house designed by Freiwald and Böhm and built in Mostecká Street in the Lesser Town, Prague. The façades facing Čelakovského Street feature a three-sided oriel on each side, and there are decorative roundels with relief sculptures (putti with various attributes) in the strip window panels. The corner forms a convex arc decorated with striking fluted lesenes. Freiwald used most of his stylish repertoire in the design – from modern classicism and Cubist decorations (which have nothing to do with the Cubist theory of tectonics crystallization, they are just Semperian “hung” ornaments) to Kotěra’s rationalist elements. For the flats owned by the Trade Cooperative, Freiwald designed fundamentally metropolitan architecture which served as a kind of background of a representative boulevard.

On the ground floor, the architects designed shops with warehouses (originally, there were thirteen of them, but the number changed, some of the shops were joined, and workshops to meet the needs of the tenants added). The flats on the first and second floor of the building no. 637 had two or three rooms. While other tenement houses in Hradec Králové included maid’s rooms even in one-bedroom flats, in this building, the standard was different: two-room flats did not have a maid’s room, while three-room flats did. In the flats situated in the unusual corner section of the building no. 637, the maid’s room was connected to the flat but it had an unconventional separate entrance from the hallway. In the houses no. 638 and 639, there were two-room flats with a kitchen, but without a maid’s room. All flats had a separate toilet, pantry, and bathroom.  

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