Group of Houses of the People’s Building and Housing Cooperative in Pilsen
1922–1924

Although the People's Building and Housing Cooperative had been operating in Pilsen before the First World War, it was the founding of Czechoslovakia and the subsequent legislative support for housing construction that caused a real boom in its activities. In addition to residential buildings projects hitherto, the cooperative also took up construction of family houses, which were subsequently acquired into private ownership by its members.

Along this line, the People's Building and Housing Cooperative built a colony of “standardised” semi-detached and detached houses in the residential district of Bezovka, as well as a group of seven semi-detached houses and one detached house at the eastern tip of the Petrohrad neighbourhood in the first half of the 1920s. The set was originally intended to cover the entire area of ​​a rectangular city block delimited by Táborská, Plzenecká, Lobezská and Guldenerova Streets. However, instead of two more family houses near Lobezská Street, the cooperative built a semi-detached residential house with a flat roof and more than thirty small flats in 1928 (C11–1117).

The unified design of semi-detached houses, to which the cooperative simultaneously built four semi-detached houses in Hruškova Street and four in Schwarzova Street (C4–1647), was the work of the Pilsen builder and long-term collaborator with the cooperative Karel Bubla. He designed the semi-detached houses as two-storey structures with cellars and non-residential attics under a hipped roof with a combination of wooden and reinforced concrete ceilings.

Their ground plan was organised symmetrically along a transverse common wall. Each half offered a one-room apartment both on the ground and the first floors, and was further divided by another load-bearing wall into two tracts. In the part adjacent to the shared wall, the builder situated a room open to the front garden with two-part casement windows with fanlights and a kitchen facing the garden. The tract along the side façade had a small hall, closet, built-on gallery, a toilet and towards the street a staircase with the house entrance on the landing between the basement and the ground floor. Although the apartments had only one room and a kitchen and no bathroom, the service wing also included a maid's room. In the basement of both halves of each semi-detached house, residents had their own cellars and a shared laundry.

In the sober morphology of the houses, Karel Bubla applied an eclectic combination of traditional and contemporary motifs. He separated the main part of the smoothly plastered facades from the basement with a ledge and topped it with a subtle crown moulding with a dentil strip. In the vertical direction, he segmented it with bossaged pilasters of giant order with a fluted upper part of the shaft and bossage in the corner section. Both the front facade and the rear facade were designed symmetrically in harmony with the overall layout.

However, by joining two pilasters near the central axis of the front façade, Bubla made the two halves of the semi-detached house look autonomous. The builder “embroidered” the side facades with two loggia galleries above one another, and topped the section above the staircase with a large dormer window with a “tympanum” of a triangular gable, which is broken up by three narrow windows illuminating the attic. The street dormer is a direct continuation of the main roof plane creating a pointed silhouette of the roof.

As evidenced by the facade of the semi-detached house no. 88 and 90 in Plzenecká Street, which is the only one preserved in its original form, some of the decorative elements of the design were simplified or not realised at all. Perhaps to cut down the cost, the cooperative did not proceed with the ornamental decoration of the fields between the windows of the ground floor and the first floor or the fluting of pilasters. In some houses, the curved ornaments above the relief framing of the main entrance were replaced by a simpler tympanum.

The detached house no. 45 in Guldenerova Street with a basement, two above-ground floors, non-residential attic and mansard roof was designed by Karel Bubla on a rectangular ground plan, with the short side facing the street. For both the ground floor and first floor, he designed a larger two-room apartment with facilities (including a bathroom this time) situated at the side external wall along with the staircase. In addition to four windows, this wall was broken up by two galleries above one another. To provide all residential rooms with independent entrances, he extended the hallway and shifted the room in the middle of the layout forward into a central avant-corps in the "representative" front facing the other side part of the garden. Both housing units had their cellars and a laundry in the basement, but the rather large area lacked a maid's room.

Similarly to the semi-detached houses, Karel Bubla used a traditionalist form of the house in this case too, with symmetrical longer side facades, rectangular vertically oriented windows or – a new feature – a mansard roof. However, the smoothly plastered facade made the buildings appear even simpler. He did not count on ornamental decorations in the fields between windows in his project; he replaced pilasters with bossage vertical strips, and underlined the crown moulding with a continuous dentil instead of a haunch. He also chose a simple geometric pattern for the metal railings of the gallery. However, the entrance to the house was emphasised by a stepping out door head and pilasters with rounded heads.

With the exception of the aforementioned semi-detached house in Plzenecká Street and one half of the semi-detached house No. 43 in Táborská Street, all the buildings in the complex underwent some building modifications – thermal insulation, extension, attic adaptation or even an additional storey. Moreover, each of the owners has chosen an individual design of the facade of their part of the semi-detached house, which also disrupted the original visual unity of the individual semi-detached houses as well as the whole complex.
 

PK – MR

Investor

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