After carrying out his accomplished designs for the grammar school and the District Council in the newly-built Masaryk Quarter (04-590, 04-650), the architect Antonín Ausobský was faced with a completely different kind of challenge. Instead of designing a new building on a green-field site, he was to design the reconstruction and merging of three historical buildings inside the historical centre of the town for the purposes of a savings bank. With his designs in 1927 Ausobský had to deal with a present-day issue: new building interventions in a historical environment.
From the perspective of care of heritage, Ausobský managed the task in a sensitive and contextual manner. After being merged, the buildings completely lost their individuality and acquired a new, uniform historicized look. However, the resulting design fitted into the overall surroundings of the town square tastefully and effortlessly. Ausobský used three shallow projections to divide the facade into seven narrow sections, thus unobtrusively evoking medieval partitioning. Moreover, the architect applied Baroque elements to the facade, which matches the neighbouring houses with its triangular pediments above the windows of the first floor, or “piano nobile”, and with its false attic windows with louvered shutters covering the spaces between the roofs of the original three buildings. It fits seamlessly into the square thanks to the irregularly spacing of the arcades.
Modifications to the facade were concluded in 1929 with the addition of two allegorical statues, Ploughing and Industry, resting on massive corbels. Both statues were by the Litomyšl artist Emil Kubíček, a pupil of Jan Štursa at the Prague Academy.
PK – AŠ
