Realschule

After the dissolution of the Hradec Králové fortress, a complex of large public buildings was built on the outskirts of the former fortification area, such as the school for artistic locksmiths (1892–1893), the Adalbertinum (1895–1897) or the Borromeum on the Orlice riverbank (1900–1902). On the eastern side, Pospíšilova Street was filled with similar buildings.

The character of the local construction was largely prefigured by the building of the higher real school in today’s Komenského Street, built by the municipal government about two decades earlier, according to the design of Václav Weber. The school’s historicist-style architecture already had a somewhat heavy-handed effect on the pupils a century ago, which was aptly described by the Hradec Králové native and later famous writer Emil Vachek (1889–1964): “The Hradec Králové Realschule looks dismal, it was a typical state building: when they built it, they did not consider beauty.” However, in terms of the internal layout, the building seemed “bright with spacious rooms, large windows, wide corridors, a sandblasted courtyard where we used to go during breaks, a gymnasium, special classrooms for chemistry, a drawing room and a beautiful principal’s office in the right corner of the first floor”. The school is a separate two-story building with a Neo-Renaissance façade. It stands on a basic E-shaped plan with

a continuous front and three tracts running out to the south side. The main façade is defined by distinctive avant/corps – two corner ones and a central one with a stone entrance staircase. On the raised ground floor, there is a generous central hall with high arches resting on cast-iron columns with Corinthian capitals. Behind it, in the same wing, there is

a representative three-armed staircase with cast-iron balustrade, and a gym extending from the basement. The space above the gym over the next two floors was originally occupied by the school chapel, which now serves as an auditorium. The other tracts were divided into two parts with light-filled corridors off the courtyard, and classrooms and specialized classrooms facing the street. The façade of the building is laid out from the stone basement, with

the ground floor rusticwork between the large semi-circular entrances and windows. Above the moulded cordon cornice, the windows on the other floors are rectangular and separated in the central avant-corps by paired pilasters with Ionic (on the first floor) and Corinthian capitals (on the second floor). The façade is finished with a magnificent carved crown cornice with dentils and garlands. The Realschule was built by Václav Kuželovský, who won the contract at a public auction. In the end, however, it had a somewhat bitter finale for him – he subsequently sued the city for reimbursement of the work that he allegedly carried out on

the orders of the architect and the building supervisor beyond the scope of the project.

The building is still used for education today, housing the Community College of Health and the Secondary Nursing School.

 

MP