College of Housewifery (today’s Student Halls of Residence for the Tertiary Professional School and Secondary Technical School)

At the end of the 1920s a single-year College of Housewifery was established in Jičín. It took over for the purpose the existing building of the Professional Agricultural School (Odborná hospodářská škola, later the Agricultural College), which relocated to new premises (S12). The educational sector in Jičín had experienced an unprecedented boom at the turn of the 20^th century. For the more than ten secondary schools which had been operating under provisional conditions since being established, the need to design and build suitable premises in immediate years ahead had become pressing. Čeněk Musil saw an opportunity to capitalise on this demand. Whether he received commissions of this type based on open architectural competitions, or was awarded contracts directly, prestigious school buildings occupy an important place in his oeuvre.

The project to reconstruct the building of the Professional Agricultural School was entrusted to Čeněk Musil in 1925. Two new parts were added to the original building, which was erected according to the designs of Bedřich Pek in 1894–1896. The two-storey old part and its basement level, which contained two rooms for the director and caretaker, the director’s office and a kitchen on the ground floor, and two classrooms, two small offices for staff and a library on the first floor, was extended to incorporate a new three-storey part situated on the corner with Českých bratří. Here the interior was largely taken up with rooms for accommodating girls.

Thus a building was created with two distinct wings, visually unified, however, by their modern façade. Whereas the simple façade of the old part was layered purely by a string course, or cornice, running above and below the windows, the corner wing was alienated by its massive cornice, separating the lower portion of the building from the second floor, where fair faced brick was used between the windows, as it was for the lesenes – emphasising the corners of the new wing and underscoring its vertical arrangement. In this project Čeněk Musil used for the final time those elements of Neoclassicism and individualistic modernism he had used on the nearby library building (VP400). An interesting element is the sandstone entrance portico with the brick parapet and two allegorical sculptures by Antonín Mára – a sculptor from nearby Hořice, which focuses attention on the main entrance. This classicising element was added to the structure based on an alternative drawing. It replaced an entrance framed by fair faced brick, as well as a layout with a pier and statue on the corner.

The College of Housewifery was officially opened on 10 September 1927. In the following year they began teaching. During the war and post-war years (up until 1947), the school occupied only the ground floor, the upper floors were given over to the labour office. Today the building is used as a halls of residence for the Tertiary Professional School and Secondary Technical School.

(GA)