The modernist extension of the State Industrial School, which combines both workshops and residential use, is one of the best examples of the sophisticated work of a regional author who worked at the school, was familiar with contemporary architecture, and developed a number of quality projects for the town.
The year 1888 marked the beginning of the history of the Secondary Industrial School in Přerov, as it was then that the Central Commission for Industrial Education in Vienna approved the establishment of the Imperial and Royal Vocational School of Mechanical Engineering. As early as 1890, it acquired a plot of land in the field between the grammar school building and the brewery, where the present four-storey historic school building with an eclectic façade was built in 1913-1914. In 1919 it was renamed the State Industrial School. Because of its popularity, when the teaching of mechanical and industrial engineering was joined in the 1920s by the teaching of civil engineering and then fine mechanics and optics, it began to have capacity problems. It should be noted that this is where the impetus for the establishment in 1933 of Optikotechna, which became a strong industrial enterprise in Přerov, originated.
In 1931, a local professor and architect, Vlastislav Chroust, designed the construction of a residential building for the school staff and a one-storey workshop extension, the mass of which he connected to the historicising building. Chroust had graduated from the Czech Technical University in Prague and in Přerov he was mainly involved in projects for tenement houses, but he was also one of the builders of the Sokol gymnasium. In 1932, the original design was modified by Ing. Holešovský and the construction was completed in 1933. In the extension, Chroust used the imaginative solution of a typologically unusual combination of residential and workshop parts. With his roots in the purism of the 1920s still evident, the author was able to present a design in the current forms of functionalism.
Chroustʼs original design connected only the ground floor and the first floor of the historicising building with two strips of wide windows of the modern workshop extension. Later, another floor was added, to the workshop part, which was thus aligned with the crown cornice of the residential part. With its large windowpanes, the single-bay extension of the workshops references the industrial architecture of factories. The residential part was designed as a three-storey corner building of a purist character with a richly sculptured façade. The dominant street façade is divided by a flat buttress, which is followed by corner balconies with rounded edges at the level of the first and second floors. The author repeated the rounded shapes in the entrance arch and in the conservatories facing the courtyard. The only “ornament” of the façade was formed by plate glass windows and smaller windows of various sizes.
There was one flat on each floor of the square layout, including that of the principal, which was connected to the school by an internal staircase leading from the entrance hall directly to the workshops. On the occasion of the construction of the workshop and residential building, the interior of the historic building, completed in 1936, was modernised by the installation of modern lighting. The industrial school thus possessed seven classrooms, a physics hall, workshops and laboratories for mechanical engineering, fine mechanics and optics, a forge, a model shop, a joinery shop, a foundry, a nickel foundry, a chrome shop, a polishing shop, warehouses for materials and models, and several classrooms and offices.
During the Second World War, the building housed the German army and the workshops of the Prostějov company Wikov. Between 1955 and 1958, one floor was added to the original building, and in 1971-1972, all the parts of the Secondary Industrial School were subected to a general overhaul, and this happened again in 2002. Recently, all the windows have been replaced for the purposes of thermal insulation, but they are copies of the original fillings, including the colour solution. Minor changes after the reconstructions are visible on the shell of the building, but the original façade remains intact. The extension with the workshop wing and residential building has been listed since 1995.
TH (translation by SG)
Selected literature
Klára Jeništová, Z Olešnice do Přerova. Dlouhá cesta přerovského architekta Vlastislava Chrousta, in: Jan Janák – Jan Jeništa – Klára Jeništová et al., Kapitoly z výtvarné kultury města Přerova: Architektura, výtvarné realizace, design, Přerov 2016, pp. 38–51.
Jiří Lapáček, Střední průmyslová škola a technické školství, in: Jarmila Klímová (ed.), Dějiny přerovského školství, Přerov 2012, pp. 155–157.
Vladimír Šlapeta – Pavel Zatloukal, Moderní architektura v Přerově, Památky a příroda 3, 1981, pp. 129–140.
Pavel Zatloukal, K přerovské moderní architektuře, Kultura Přerova XXIII, 1980, č. 12, pp. 182–183.
Veřejná soutěž, Haná XXIII, 1932, č. 73, 27. 3., p. 11.
Sources
přístavba dílenského traktu a obytné budovy - Památkový Katalog (pamatkovykatalog.cz)
Martina Horáčková, Architektura střední Moravy, 1918–1945: Přerov, Kroměříž, Bystřice pod Hostýnem, Holešov, Kojetín (diploma thesis), Katedra teorie a dějin výtvarných umění FFUP, Olomouc 2004, pp. 60–61.
