Tenement houses

After 1910, the newly founded Husovo (later Masarykovo) náměstí Square was gradually built up with representative apartment houses. It was completed in the first half of the 1920s, when the façade was given a uniform architectural form by Josef Gočár and Josef Fňouk and corner houses Nos. 581, 617, 618, and 637 were completed.

 

The construction of house no. 504 was started in March 1911 and completed on 16 August 1911. The neighboring house, for which considerably less documentation survives, was probably not completed until the second half of 1911 and January 1912, as both houses were approved at the same time on 19 January 1912.

 

Both buildings are symmetrical and form one architectural unit. The façade was designed

by the local builder František Jaroslav Černý in a very modern way: the ground floor was to be made of uncut stone, but two stepped gables were to enclose the front to each street; one large, stepped gable with flared friezes was to face the square and the façade was to be articulated by lesenes across the first and second floors, which were to be lined with strips

of unplastered masonry. A similar solution can be found in the project of the second Hanuš’s house designed by Vladimír Fultner and Josef Novotný or in the now defunct façade

of Novotný’s house No. 511. A little earlier, however, Vladimír Fultner and the builder Josef Novotný completed the project of the Trade House, which is directly opposite the houses

No. 504 and 508; the buildings thus form a mutual opposition closing the square from

the south-eastern side. Probably for this reason František Jaroslav Černý decided to adapt the exterior of houses No. 504 and 508 to Fultner’s design and used simplified motifs of Fultner’s façade: stepped shallow lesenes, friezes of stylized floral and geometric ornaments and oval cartouches in the area of the crown cornice, and alternation of smooth and rough plaster between the windows. Only the stepped gables remain from the original design.

 

The houses had a mirrored layout. Each house contained five smaller cellars in the basement, one large cellar, a large workshop with windows to the courtyard, a smaller workshop,

and a laundry room. On the ground floor, the street parterre was filled with shops: one large one faced the beveled corner into the square and four smaller ones faced the side streets. The part facing the courtyard contained an apartment with a bathroom, kitchen, bedroom

nd another room facing the street. On the sides of each house, there was a passage to

the yard. On the first and second floors, there were two generous four-room apartments with

a kitchen, bathroom, toilet and pantry. The attic, whose beams and other wooden elements in the house were made by master carpenter Josef Bareš, housed one more small apartment with a kitchen and a bedroom and one two-room apartment with a kitchen. Both of these attic apartments had only a toilet and no pantry or bathroom.

 

The designs of the two houses, nos. 504 and 508, were examples of surprisingly more ambitious and modern townhouses than the result, as the builder wanted to conform to

the opposite design by Vladimír Fultner. This proves that the builder and architect František Jaroslav Černý was capable of both conservative designs in historicist and eclectic styles,

as well as purely modern designs that responded to the current impulses of cultural centers.

 

LZL