Department store – furniture market

A limited company furniture dealership – Společná tržnice nábytku v Jičíně – turned to Čeněk Musil in 1930 with a request to build a new structure that would satisfy the requirements of a modern sales/exhibition space. It was to be built on the site of a former two-storey building on the main street, which the company purchased from the Jičín Municipal Authority.

The furniture market is one of Musil’s few purely functionalist buildings. This laterally conceived building, its ribbon windows alternating with the bands of the plain white façade, was set within the street’s older buildings, with which the original building had been poorly matched. The display windows on the ground floor ensconce a central passage, through which the entrance hall is accessed, from where, climbing two simple granite staircases, visitors would continue to the large display rooms on the first and second floors. The market also has a third floor, set back from the street and so leaving space for a terrace.

The furniture market was officially opened 29 June 1933 as part of the Bohemian Paradise Exhibition Fair (Výstavní trh Českého ráje) in Jičín, at which Čeněk Musil participated as committee member and designer for the overall arrangements as well as individual sections. (For the space delineated by the Commercial College, today’s cinema, and today’s nursery school on the one side, and the chateau garden and elementary school on the other, Musil designed two pavilions, market stalls, gates to collect entrance fees, flagpoles, signposting, stairways and cloakrooms. Musil was just as highly engaged in the following fair, four years later in 1937)

To the left of this building is another of Čeněk Musil’s works. The original two-storey apartment building with two flats, built on this site at the behest Bohuslav Mareček in 1895, was adapted by Musil in 1935. While retaining the perimeter walls, on the ground floor was set up shops and workshops; the upper storey and attic, meanwhile, were fully demolished, and two new floors took their place.

(GA)