Apartment and commercial building of Anna and Jan Matoušek
1934–1935

The numerous building activities that Jan Matoušek and his wife Anna engaged in in the mid-1930s, especially in collaboration with the Pilsen architect František Němec Jr., on the site of the former engineering works of the Belani Brothers in the Na Belánce district of Pilsen, gave the newly developing area a refined architectural feel of Modernist style. One of the first buildings to be erected on the basis of this collaboration was the corner three-storey apartment and commercial building No. 2 Na Belánce Street in 1934–1935. This building, together with Josef Špalek Sr.’s simultaneously erected house No. 1 (C3–2074) across the street on the junction with Klatovská Avenue, opened the way for other Functionalist development on the block.

The formal conception of the facade of the house, however, underwent complicated development and repeated revision by the municipal authority’s architectural committee. The committee required that the mass of the building match a planned adjacent three-storey building with a sloping roof – the builder Ferdinand Kout’s apartment and commercial building (C3–2085) – and the Redemptorist Monastery (C3–45) next to the Church of St. John of Nepomuk. The Matoušeks' building was supposed to be adapted also to the aforementioned Špalek house, designed by the talented young architect Leo Meisl, which, however, was composed of four storeys and had a contrasting flat roof. Němec therefore modified the original plans and designed a quite large, flat-roofed dormer in the corner, which gives that part of the roof structure the impression of a fourth floor, corresponding in height to the house opposite. The verticality is also underlined by the unobtrusive motif of a narrow, vertical "notch" in the corner, revealing curved ceramic tiling. The alternating of smooth, light-coloured “Brizolit" render with distinctive brown tiling, together with shallow projecting sections and lesenes became a consistent feature of the otherwise quite plain facade.

On the Klatovská Avenue side of the building there were two shops on the ground floor with large display windows and on the upper floors the grand spaces of large, four-room flats. On the Na Belánce side, on the contrary, were more modest, two-room apartments.
At the present time the building is in a good, well-maintained condition.

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