Primary School in Prague Suburbs

In 1891, Prague Suburbs became an independent municipality, which needed a municipal school to ensure its proper functioning. The local people had already called for its establishment earlier, as they found the school in Kukleny too far away for their children.
To build its own school, the local government chose a vacant plot of land opposite today’s Sukovy sady Park, where the new building was to complete the space of the intended square. In February 1896, the school board then announced a public competition for the design of
the educational institute and the budget for the building. The winner was Čeněk Křička from Kolín, an architect, a builder and a member of the local city council, with his design entitled “Light, Air.” The graduate of the Czech Technical School and pupil od Prof. Josef Schulz had already designed several public buildings in the Neo-Renaissance style, such as credit unions in Kutná Hora (1894) and Kolín (1895). He also successfully developed the expressive means of this style in the design of a school building in the suburbs of Hradec Králové. It was a one-storey building on a shortened T-shaped plan with simple decoration, which corresponded to the competition brief: “The façade should be tasteful, but not beautiful and only in the front.” The main façade was bordered by two corner avant-corps and dominated by an entrance flanked by columns with Ionic capitals and topped by a tympanum with a bust of Comenius. The façade of the ground floor, set above the surrounding terrain, was embossed throughout and had windows without ornamentation. A cordoned cornice with a distinctive dentil separated the first floor, where the windows had shallowly profiled chambranles and over-window cornices on pairs of brackets. The avant-corps at this level had semi-circular arched niches. Inside the basement there were cellars and from the entrance there was a short staircase to the ground floor. To the right, there was the director’s office and flat, which consisted of a kitchen and two rooms. On the left, there were two classrooms, each 72.6 m2 in size and with a capacity of eighty pupils! Most of the floor was occupied by four other classrooms, with only the middle part containing a classroom for the natural history collections. Behind the school, a garden and a playground were designed. The commission for the municipal school for Prague Suburbs was conducted by the Prague builder Vratislav Pasovský, who also took part in the competition for its design, in which he came second. In 1906, the rapidly growing number of children necessitated the addition of another floor to the building, the form of which was identical to the original. However, even this was not enough, and so the Prague Suburbs Town Hall had to design a new school on today’s Jiráskovo náměstí Square in the 1930s. Its construction according to Gustav Louženský’s designs was completed after delays only during the war. In 1938, the old school received a gymnasium extension in the courtyard, and in the 1960s a new three-storey pavilion was built on the land behind it. In the 1970s, the local art school also began to operate on the site, later taking over the use of the entire original building designed by Křička. 

MP