Commercial and apartment building of Marie and Josef Cerha
1932–1933

The first block of the eastern part of Americká Avenue ends at the junction with Pařížská Street with the large commercial and apartment corner house of Josef Cerhový and his wife Marie. The five-storey building with a prismatic corner tower and a low, elongated loft mass was designed in the early 1930s by the prominent Pilsen architect Bohumil Chvojka. The construction work was conducted by the firm of Josef Špalek Sr. The abstract geometric form of the building and the absence of relief ornament illustrates Chvojka’s decisive shift from late geometric Modernism and various versions of the National Style and Art Deco towards purely Functionalist architecture. This is borne out also by the flat roofs of the corner tower and the southern part of the house.

While the architect designed the ground-floor space, lined on the street frontage by shop display windows, for commercial operation, he conceived the upper floors as residential. He accentuated the austere Purist main facade above the level of the second floor with a three-storey high oriel with a regular pattern of four large rectangular windows on each floor and additionally a pair of loggias on the second floor. On the Pařížská Street facade he applied a similar three-storey high oriel, but with three windows on each floor. Both projecting masses are roofed with narrow terraces with steel-tube railings.

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