Completion of the museum (Kotěra’s design)

Jan Kotěra considered the addition of a wing enclosing the inner courtyard of the building on the north and east sides as early as 1907. In this design, it was not entirely clear what the new wings would contain, except perhaps that the ground floor eastern wing was to serve as a collection of stone monuments and was retained in all subsequent plans. However, due to the exhaustion of the budget after the completion of the museum to the last penny and the beginning of the WWI, the expansion to include exhibition halls and depositories was not actual for some time.
 

After the war, Jan Kotěra was summoned to Hradec Králové. He was tasked with updating the plans for the extension and designing a storage system for the exhibition and depository halls of the museum. The plans for the extension, dated 1919, have survived in a very general schedule, likely intended for a public competition or as an initial conceptual design for Kotěra’s future work. This layout envisioned a two-storey wing terminating in a one-story extension and an associated seven-bay ground-floor gallery tract of large sculptures that enclosed the eastern edge of the lot facing away from present-day Kotěrova Street. A library and study, a drawing room, and a collection of plaster casts and photographs were to be moved into the new addition. The first floor was to house the collections of the Museum of Decorative Arts, and the extended end was to contain a painting room and a graphic cabinet. The purpose of the rooms on the second floor was not decided. However, even this effort to extend the building did not find any practical fulfilment, and the museum management and the city representatives did not return to the plan for the museum until 1942 through a close architectural competition.
 

After the WWI, only a special storage system for the collections according to Kotěra’s design was crafted. Between 1920 and 1922, the halls of the museum were equipped with black lacquered exhibition cabinets and showcases designed by Jan Kotěra. They had many variants, corner pieces, free-standing double-sided pieces, etc. The glass fillings of the showcases were set in iron frames with dusty deerskin tape, allowing the protection of the exhibited objects. The cabinets were made by the cabinetmakers Josef Scháněl and Josef Michálek with the help of František Košťál, who worked as a janitor in the museum.
 

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