Two neighbouring houses at nos. 8, 6 and 4 Majerova Street have a number of things in common: the location and time of their construction as well as some of the persons involved. Václav and Marie Štrunc, the future owners of house no. 8, bought the land from the Pilsen builder Josef Krofta, who realised house no. 4. The construction of the Štrunces’ house in 1931 was led by the architect Antonín Štipl, whose company was building the neighbouring house no. 6 at that time. The realisation of the building for the Štrunc family proceeded without complications, so less than six months after the beginning of work the house was finished. The author of the project was most likely the Pilsen architect and builder Frantisek Měsíček.
The symmetrically arranged front of the three-storey apartment building, which is part of the street front opposite the building of the German and subsequently the Czech Secondary School for Engineering (C6–1615), is dominated by a centrally located shallow bay with large windows lighting the staircase space. The building’s entrance is situated on the central axis of the facade as well, accented by a relief frame and a simple geometric bossage. The ground floor is separated from the remaining surface of the facade with colour differentiated lesene frames by a simply shaped cornice.
The spatial and layout arrangement of the building with six apartments is less typical. The architect situated sanitary facilities with bathrooms and toilets in the middle of the floor plan in order to fully exploit the street and yard facades for illuminating the living rooms and kitchens. A load-bearing wall traditionally dividing a residential house into the street tract and the courtyard tract was replaced in the project by four brick pillars and a transverse girder, while the chimney was deep in the court section layout (static interaction being provided by the girder in place of the chimney). In the central service tract the architect designed a reinforced concrete ceiling construction; in other parts of the house there were wood-beamed ceilings.
The author of the project conveniently applied the above-mentioned layout on the ground floor and the second floor, where he always situated two smaller units with a kitchen facing the street, a room facing the courtyard and the entrance and facilities in the middle. In contrast, the limits of this solution are evident in the ground plan of the generous three-room apartment on the first floor – because the hall could not be placed in the middle wing "occupied" by the bathroom and toilet, the result was an inconvenient horseshoe layout with pass-through rooms. The building also included the caretaker’s apartment in the basement, which still served to accommodate doctors and nurses of the Pilsen University Hospital into the 1960s.
Although a substantial part of the Štrunc house’s expression has survived to this day, the original colour design of the facade is no longer evident. Also, the original wooden pane windows have been replaced by plastic windows with simple segmentation.
OM – PK
Václav and Marie Štrunc