Office Building of the Municipal Gasworks

The administrative and residential building was built as the headquarters of the second municipal gasworks, but the building also housed a branch of the Hradec Králové Savings Bank. Although the original municipal gasworks, which used to be located near today’s ice rink, was one of the first in Czechoslovakia and the town council decided to build it at the beginning of 1865, it operated only until 1917, when production was stopped due to low demand for gas, lack of coal and poor technical condition. The original site was subsequently used for other purposes until it was demolished in 1969. 

 

A new, more modern gasworks was subsequently considered by the city as early as 1922. A gasworks project to produce cheaper binary gas, which would also move the gasworks to the Kukleny area, was finally approved by the city council in January 1927. Its design was probably drawn up by the Municipal Technical Office, and the construction was financially supported by Škoda Works, whose local plant dominated Kukleny (in 1929 the company employed 1,700 workers). Škoda Works, which also undertook to buy most of the gas produced, offered the city the land of the old sugar factory near the main station for the new gasworks. The gasworks were also commissioned to produce binary gas generators of their own design. Due to the technology, which had not been proven yet, the commissioning was delayed by several months. After completion, the plant was the only one in Europe to operate on binary gas. To promote the use of gas in households, lectures and demonstrations of the equipment were held and a free magazine, Větepok, was published. In April and May 1929, for example, the Hradec Králové Gasworks held a series of lectures and demonstrations on cooking, baking and frying with gas in the showroom of the Electricity Company’s office in the City House near the museum. Lectures were given every Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday in the early evening and by the end of May the attendance exceeded 300 people. 

 

A permit for the construction of the headquarters of the gasworks was applied for by the contractor on 21 March 1928. It was granted by the municipal authority of Kukleny on 17 April 1928, and the building was approved on 12 June 1929. According to the certificate of completion, the building had five offices on the ground floor for the purposes of the savings bank of the town of Hradec Králové, a one-room apartment with a kitchen and accessories, as well as workshops, a warehouse, a laundry, and a drying room. The workshops and offices also included cloakrooms and washrooms. On the first and second floors there were two apartments – a one-room apartment with a kitchen and a two-room – which were equipped with standard facilities (bathrooms and toilets, pantries and pantries, the two-room apartments also had maid's rooms).
 

The building is 16.6m wide on the street side, 12.75m deep and topped by a flat pitched roof built on wooden decks. Originally the rafters were covered with cardboard. The ceilings of the last floor were also covered with cardboard. A reinforced concrete staircase leads to the floors of the building. The ground floor has a ceiling height of 3.5m, the first and second floors ceilings 3.05m; the ceiling of the second floor also contains a supporting structure for the roof. A courtyard extension is added to the main part of the building, i.e. the residential part, which is roofed in the same way; however, the second floor is spared and the ceiling height is 3.3m. The building had a basement, where the ceiling of the cellars is 2.5m high. The façade with bays of exposed masonry fits the neighborhood which was supposed to be a factory district. The façade of the first floor extension is rendered in a conventional manner and the bricks can only be seen in the window jambs. The brick character of the façade has been applied mainly to the street frontage of the building. A mosaic pavement with curbs was originally laid out from the main street, which was made of blue granite. 

 

Although the experimental equipment for the production of binary gas was able to make gas for most of the city, it was replaced in the 1930s by a more modern method of production, which involved the carbonization of black Ostrava coal. This produced by-products such as coke and tar. The last expansion of capacity occurred in 1948, but by then there were proposals to stop production and switch to supplying the city with the increasing demands of the gradually built Czech system of long-distance high-pressure gas pipelines. The shutdown of operations was thus slowly approaching since the connection of Hradec Králové to the gas pipeline branch of the gasworks in Záluží in 1950 and with the later gradual gasification of the town. On 27 April 1964, the production at the Hradec Králové gasworks was finally terminated. Apart from the residential and administrative buildings, only the water tower with a workshop building has survived. 

 

Polina Davydenko, Lukáš Dobeš, Adam Hejduk