State Technical School

In 1927, after the completion of the existing historicizing building on the first city ring road (house no. 274) was dropped, a competition for a new building of the State Industrial School was announced. Thirty architects submitted their designs, and design architect Oldřich Tyl, a co-author of the Trade Fair Palace in Prague, won the competition. The second prize was awarded to the design by Pavel Smetana, Josef Grus and Alois Wachsman, and the jury recommended the city councillors to award eight more projects. Probably due to the bankruptcy of Tekra company, co-owned by Oldřich Tyl, the winning project did not materialize and was entrusted to Jan Rejchl who took part in the competition as well (other competitors included Bedřich Adámek, Oldřich Liska, and Jan Víšek).  Rejchl’s bold and original design was based on a longitudinal four-storey tract with long strip windows and all-glass corner with the main entrance and staircase. The very subtle functionalist project was eventually transformed into a more purist and monumental one which resembles the competition projects by Oldřich Tyl and Bedřich Adámek in many respects. Rejchl was probably asked to combine several projects, including his own, so he created a synthesis of both progressive and traditional approaches.

The building was the seat the newly formed conglomerate of vocational secondary schools: a masonry school, carpentry school, vocational school for art locksmiths founded in 1874, and school for plumbers founded in 1918. Moreover, a higher technical school of civil engineering was established, as well. Besides the tanning school, designed by Josef Gočár, the technical school designed by Rejchl became a showcase of modern vocational education in Hradec Králové and a prototype of a modern school building built according to the most modern principles. Contemporary newspapers wrote it was “a thoroughly lovely building”. The building started to be used in 1930; it was fully operational since the school year of 1931/1932. The construction of courtyard workshops was completed in 1934.

In the school year of 1928/1929, architect Bohumil Waigant, who had just returned to Hradec Králové from Slovakia, accepted a teaching position at the school. One of the few surviving interiors designed by him can be found in the headmaster’s office of the technical school. It includes several pieces of furniture and several types of chairs resembling the monumental trends in modernism, sometimes known as historicist modernism in connection with Jan Kotěra.  

LZL