Apartment buildings

Plans for two identical blocks of flats were drawn up by Čeněk Musil at the request of the Construction Cooperative of Workers’ and Families’ Houses in Jičín (Stavební družstvo dělnických a rodinných domků pro Jičín a okolí), for whom he worked many times during the 1920s and 1930s.

The façade of these buildings, whose plans were approved by the Jičín Municipal Authority on 18 December 1922, reflect Musil’s early creative period. As in the case of the surgical pavilion at Jičín Hospital, here too we find his characteristic sandstone socles, the triangular gables and lesenes, the arch décor and crowning cornices with half-cylinders. The internal layout of the three-storey structures comprises two generous apartments on each floor and a stairwell. A kitchen, one or two separate rooms, a hallway and WC/bathroom, with an added balcony on the first and second floors.

The phenomenon of apartment co-operatives, which had begun to appear in the Czech lands back in the 19^th century, experienced its greatest flowering in interwar Czechoslovakia. No doubt contributing to this boom was the “apartment crisis” on the heels of World War I. By 1930 the cooperative owned over ten of these low-rise blocks. At the same time, it was also providing for the construction of detached houses, which were then subsequently paid off by members and so became their private property.

(GA)