Architecture

The Long Century

The architectural collection of the Museum of Art includes urban studies, building plans, and models from the 19th century to the present. Its provenance is largely Moravian, but a significant part of the collection crosses the borders of Moravia. The collection includes a very good representation of architectural works related to Olomouc in the 19th and first half of the 20th century.

The appearance of today’s Olomouc and its urban development after 1900 was significantly influenced by the Viennese architect Camillo Sitte (1843-1903). His regulatory plan from 1894 continued the gradual development of the city, which was beginning to break free from the confines of its walls. The leading urban planning theorist of the time designed a metropolitan ring road for the western part of Olomouc, modeled on Vienna and Brno, which was to be connected to a variety of apartment buildings surrounding diversely shaped public spaces. A tram loop encircled the city on the very edge of the city parks. The architect incorporated his belief in the free formation of the city into the Olomouc plan, but this was conditional on the organic connection of the new development with the old. 

Moravia

In connection with the exhibition activities of the former Regional Gallery of Fine Arts, the predecessor of today’s Olomouc Museum of Art, extensive collections mapping the best of Moravian city architecture were acquired for the collection as early as the 1970s and 1980s.

In addition to Olomouc, these include Brno, Krnov, Kroměříž, Prostějov, Přerov, Šumperk, and the spa towns of Jeseník, Teplice nad Bečvou, and, last but not least, Luhačovice.

The Luhačovice complex of buildings represents a distinctive contribution to the art of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. It is dominated by the regionally influenced work of Dušan Jurkovič (1868-1947), which is very well represented in the architectural sub-collection of the Museum of Art.

In its day, the fairy-tale architecture in the Luhačovice Valley aroused passionate emotions. One of its supporters was Jan Kotěra, who appreciated its originality and free use of elements of folk architecture. In 1904, Kotěra wrote in the magazine Volné směry (Free Directions), the forum of the Czech modernist movement: “Art here arose not only in the landscape, but from it, forming a harmonious whole with it.” According to Kotěra, Jurkovič “does not pursue a collected ethnographic form, but expresses himself in his own natural form of expression, one that comes from the blood.”

Jurkovič’s renovations and new buildings for the complex, which in its day became the lively center of cultural life in Moravia, were also connected with the search for a generally applicable national character in architecture, a topic often discussed by the Czech intelligentsia at the time. Nevertheless, Jurkovič’s buildings in Luhačovice also contain many references to Viennese and British modernism. Of the dozens of unique projects for Luhačovice, Jan’s House from 1902 represents the pinnacle of his work. In 2003, the Museum of Art had a three-dimensional model made of the planning documentation stored in the architecture collection, with a hypothetical reconstruction of the intended color scheme.

Functionalism

Probably the most significant architect who spent a large part of his life in Olomouc was Lubomír Šlapeta (1908–1983). His extensive estate – together with the legacy of his brother Čestmír Šlapeta (1908-1999) – is administered by the architecture collection of the Olomouc Museum of Art, which also prepared a large exhibition and publication project in 2003. This made it possible to present the work of this exceptional architectural duo in many places, even beyond the borders of the Czech Republic.

The presented villa of Stanislav Nakládal in Olomouc (Polívkova Street 35) stands at the end of a series of designs for luxury individual housing that Lubomír Šlapeta carried out between the two world wars. It embodies the ideal of a functional and well-designed family home of that time – a continuous connection between individual rooms, direct contact with the garden, whether via an outdoor staircase or a terrace on the same level as the floor. The only “decoration” of the clean facades is a thoughtful geometric composition that corresponds to the practicality of the interior layout.

The documentation of the building shows the complexity of the architectural collection – from implementation projects, including the smallest technical details, to publication drawings, from photographic documentation to models. The Museum of Art had a modern model of Nakládal’s villa made in 1996 for exhibition purposes, but also as one of a series of twenty models depicting key milestones in the history of Czech and Moravian modern architecture.

Machinism / SIAL

Václav Králíček’s graduation project represents early evidence of increased interest in technical architecture, which was then given concrete form in the Czech environment by the Sial brand. From utopian projects parallel to global Hi-Tech architecture (Yony Friedman, Japanese metabolists, English Archigram), the Liberec association worked its way up to projects that attracted international attention. Králíček’s project was appealing in its ambiguity – on the one hand, it sought to protect the charm of Prague’s endangered Žižkov district, while on the other, its chained structures transcending the historical fabric exaggeratedly confirmed the enthusiasm for utopian visions of the future.

The collection of architecture diploma projects by future Sial members has strengthened the collection’s focus on works from the second half of the 20th century. The acquisition of works from the Sial studio is linked to the 2010 exhibition project and the publication Sial (English version), which was the first comprehensive presentation of the work of this exceptional group. It was awarded the title of Most Beautiful Czech Book in the scientific literature category for its attractive graphic design.

Fiction

The original model and documentation of the Heliopolis project, a seminal work in the history of Slovak architecture, was acquired by the Olomouc Museum of Art in 2010 as one of the key acquisitions for the Central European Forum Olomouc (SEFO) project.

Unlike the Liberec architectural group Sial, which had to bring at least some of its projects to fruition in order to survive, the architectural work of the Slovak group VAL always remained at the conceptual stage. Nevertheless, they were often worked out down to the smallest technical detail, as evidenced by Heliopolis, a project for an Olympic city in the High Tatras, or Akustikon, a kinetic concert hall, the design of which is also owned by the Olomouc Museum of Art.

Alex Mlynárčik and his colleagues created a separate category for their utopian projects, called prospective architecture, which carves out its own niche in conceptual art. Visions that could hardly be realized in the reality of Czechoslovak normalization were aimed more at finding a balance between society, culture, and nature—they sought “ways and aspects of tomorrow” [Voies et Aspectes du Lendemain], which gave rise to the name of this creative trio, VAL. The most detailed information about their work is provided by the CEAD database.

Nové objevy

Acquisitions of regional architectural works from the socialist era continue despite the fact that, with a few exceptions, we have already bid farewell to the oldest generation of Stavoprojekt architects. One example is the recent purchase of a collection of drawings from the preparations for the internal competition for the Commercial Project of the Consumer Cooperative Center (SSD). Slovak architect Lumír Lýsek, head of the Bratislava branch of the Commercial Project, won in 1966 with a project that was later reworked by Vladimír Polesný, Ivo Kučírek, and Alois Haltmar from Center 07 in Olomouc. This allows us to document the image and former ideals of modernist Olomouc, which we are gradually losing through successive reconstructions. At the same time, we are expanding our acquisitions to map the theme of new buildings in a historical environment, which, given the prominent position of the Olomouc urban conservation area among other valuable collections in Bohemia, can serve as a basis for a broader case study.

The Acquisition of Postmodernism

The era of transitional architecture, both local and Central European, presents new challenges for the museum’s acquisition policy. The first drawings created in graphic computer programs and printed using appropriate reprographic techniques, or directly digitized, are given registration numbers. Another strategic acquisition goal is to capture the delayed arrival of postmodern architecture in the Czech Republic, its dead ends, and the emergence of new trends in architecture, but also more broadly in urban planning and monument preservation. Michal Brix’s hand-drawn precision, with which he captures the compositional principles of postmodernism, was replaced in the early 1990s by the first computer drawings. The drawings by Vít Janků and Martin Lubič for the Šumperk savings bank represent some of the earliest domestic outputs of digital programs, which at that time only supplemented the still manual sketches and plans. We will verify whether the impressive assemblies, which a standard program might have struggled with for a whole day, helped determine the final form of the architecture.