In the 1930s the corner plot with a view of Jirásek Square was bought by the carpenter Jan Vacík, who had an apartment house built here in 1940-1941, originally intended for the employees of the Slavia Insurance Company. However, the events of the Second World War, the necessary post-war repairs of the damage caused by one of the air raids of 1945 and the onset of the communist regime in 1948, thwarted the planned sale of the building to the financial institution. While a part of the house was used by the builder’s family, Jan Vacík handed over a smaller part of the building with several flats in public use in anticipation of the upcoming social changes and pressure on private owners of “excessive” real estate. Nonetheless, he had to repay the construction loan in full.
Jan Vacík carried out the first study himself as a graduate of the carpentry department of the Master School of Civil Engineering at the Czech State Technical School in Pilsen in 1939. In the ground plan of the house, he respected both the street line and the trapezoid shape of the plot. The house was to be lined with a generous strip of a front garden in both streets; however, due to its location in the street corner, the building enclosed by the gable walls of the neighbouring houses had only a minimal courtyard. The operation and layout of the house as planned by Vacík was rather cumbersome; he conceived the building as a double wing with rooms and kitchens facing the streets and facilities and a house staircase inserted into the courtyard tract. There was a cellar under a part of the house and the basement floor was placed a meter below the level of the pavement.
Jan Vacík was also not very imaginative in designing the exterior of the building – he divided the three-storey body of the building with large plastered areas with two unequally wide projecting parts on both sides of the corner, topping them with a high hipped roof. Next to the oriels, the builder lowered the outer parts of the building by one floor, bringing them closer to the height level of the neighbouring multi-storey houses. Vacík’s project was not carried out; however, some of the proposed elements became a characteristic part of the realized house – in addition to the shallow bay windows, this mainly concerned the rounded corner emphasized by windows inserted into its central axis.
In 1940, a year before obtaining his own authorization to practice the building profession, Jan Vacík commissioned František Měsíček, a Pilsen builder, to prepare a project. In a design more successful in its layout and artistry, he built upon on Vacík’s work to some extent, including the basic silhouette of the house; however, he raised the basement floor to the level of the pavement, thus avoiding a more demanding foundation of the building. He also modified the floor plan so that the two main facades were at right angles. Also thanks to the orthogonal structure, Měsíček developed a very clear and rational layout. He concentrated two one-room and one two-room apartments on the ground floor and the first floor; the larger one included an entrance hall with softly rounded wall edges and a bedroom in the rounded corner with a narrow strip of a balcony (it is interesting to note that the bedroom was not connected to the living room and was accessible only from the kitchen).
On the second floor, in order to lower the outer part of the house in Kyjevská Street, the builder designed a studio apartment (a “living room”) with a smaller utility room, illuminated by a dormer in a sloping roof, instead of a one-room flat. Like Vacík, Měsíček concentrated the apartment facilities – consisting of a bathroom, toilet, pantry and in most cases also a utility room – in the courtyard tract, usually grouping them around the air shaft to ensure ventilation. It is worth mentioning that Měsíček separated the flats from each other, following Vacík’s example, with double partition walls. In the basement, the builder placed cellar units for all apartments, a shared laundry room, an office, a garage and a caretaker’s room. Měsíček left the space under the truss, which was designed and executed by Vacík himself, and the articulated hip roof empty.
František Měsíček built upon Jan Vacík’s project in the mass concept of the building as well and in the basic organisation of the smoothly-plastered facades. However, the exterior of the house was conceived proportionally along the axis of symmetry in the corner, the round shape of which he accentuated with the help of balconies with a characteristic solid railing, a horizontal crevice for rainwater drainage and a subtle steel handrail. He broke up the corner with a balcony door and a pair of windows on each floor, topping it off with a parapet wall with low windows illuminating the attic. On both main facades, Měsíček “unfolded” a shallow two-storey bay window, which was rhythmized with large four-part windows and crowned with loggias, delimited by walls with a rounded front extending beyond the railing. Walls resembling columns and flat roofs of loggias helped develop the traditional motif of support and load, evoking classical architecture. The builder used the form of “half-columns” separating the loggia space eight years earlier at the Krásný family house on Slovanská Avenue (C11–1356) and the Suknaspol building (C1–1787), built on Americká Avenue also at the end of the 1930s and beginning of the 1940s.
In the outer parts of the building, the builder applied three-part windows – in this case too with the characteristic combination of red casings, white frames and green window sills. The original exterior of the house is completed by other “Měsíček typical” elements, such as the banded bossage emphasizing the house entrance from Kyjevská Street with rounded jambs and connecting the windows in the basement into a horizontal strip. František Měsíček chose a moderate combination of ochre and reddish colours for the “Brizolit” cement plaster. In addition to Měsíček’s invention and the originality of his buildings, the shades of the facades, the morphology of the ground floor or the solid railings of the balconies and loggias bear evidence of the increased “heaviness” of the modernist architecture of the late 1930s.
The construction of the house was not carried out by Jan Vacík himself; however, he coordinated all the building and craft works of several dozen suppliers, most of which were executed by the company of Josef Hajšman. Thanks to the care of the investor’s grandson, a number of original materials and building details have been preserved in the building: wooden windows, an entrance hall with shiny ceramic tiling, small-format floor tiles in the corridors, figured doors to apartments and common rooms or a fence with a decorative strip of rough plaster.
PK – OM
Investor
Jan Vacík