Alfa Palace

Although Bohuslav Fuchs was reluctant to take credit for the realization of the Alpha Palace, as the experienced builder František Hrdina took the initiative and completed the building according to his own vision, the resulting house is a prime example of Le Corbusier's admiration for ocean liners, which are perfectly functioning mechanisms. The Alpha Palace, designed in 1930 by Karel Bezrouk based on Fuchs's proposal, is an example of a fully self-sufficient metropolitan building. Just like on a ship, you can spend entire days here without having to leave the palace and without suffering in any way. The Alpha Palace can offer you cultural activities in the basement (Alfa cinema and Metro Hall dance bar), underground parking, a shopping arcade illuminated by glass blocks at ground level, office spaces on the upper floors, 180 residential units, and sunlit roof terraces on the top floors. In the famous café of Vladimír Borkovec, which was designed (according to Felix Haas) by Norbert Troller in the corner of the mezzanine, the elite of the time gathered, who have since moved to Švanda café in the arcade designed by the RAW studio. The original Fuchs design was more articulated and cantilevered toward the street with a series of balconies and distinctive banded windows. However, this solution did not accommodate as much internal space as the client envisioned, and for pragmatic reasons, he decided to adopt a more cohesive variant. The first half of the building was put into operation as early as February 1932, and the entire metropolitan Alpha Palace was completed five years later. (pš)

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At the beginning of the 1930s, an experimental multipurpose building began to rise near Café Opera at the corner of Jánská and Poštovská streets – the Alpha Palace, designed for the commercially savvy owner of a construction business, František Hrdina, likely by an employee of his company, Karel Bezrouk. In the design work for the Alpha, he successfully utilized numerous creative influences from an earlier proposal for this building by Bohuslav Fuchs. The palace was equipped with underground garages, a premier cinema for 800 viewers, and a basement dance bar called Metro-Hall. Retail spaces were located on the ground floor, facing not only the street but also concentrated around a covered central courtyard-passage within the building. Here was, for example, a modern fast-food outlet by František Lehký, complemented by the sale of Moravian wines. The circulating gallery above the courtyard was designated for commercial and production spaces for small businesses, such as women's tailoring, watchmaking, shoemaking, bookbinding, artificial flower manufacturing, as well as services like hairdressing, manicure, and pedicure. According to some designs, a portion of the spaces on the mezzanine facing Poštovská Street was also reserved for medical offices with the necessary facilities. The dominant feature of the gallery was the generously conceived Café Alfa with a gaming area, which occupied the entire mezzanine of buildings Jánská No. 11, Jánská No. 13, and Poštovská No. 10. Its tenant was the renowned Brno café owner Vladimír Borkovec, who was later succeeded by Jan Florian.
In a collection of graphic documents related to the Alpha Palace, preserved today in the Moravian State Archives in Brno, there is an unsigned and undated design for this café, which is likely the work of Bohuslav Fuchs according to handwriting analysis. However, the layout of the café's halls was significantly altered during implementation, as the originally separate rooms for the club, parlor, and chess corner were interconnected to create a large, spatially unified hall with several height levels, accommodating more guests than the original Fuchs café. The author of this final modification is unknown. Doc. Ing. Arch. Felix Haas, a historian of modern architecture and a professor of architectural history at the Faculty of Architecture at VUT in Brno, states in a letter from July 1990, published in the book Brno Jewish Architects, that the designer of Café Alfa was the Brno architect Norbert Troller. Given the absence of any authentic documentation that could support Haas's claim, Troller's participation in the café project cannot be accepted nor rejected. However, it is not excluded that the final form of Café Alfa was the work of the aforementioned Karel Bezrouk.
The airy and bright café hall, furnished with typical round or rectangular tables with marble tops, Thonet chairs and armchairs, and upholstered booths along the inner and outer walls, which offered an interesting view of the bustling intersection of Jánská, Poštovská, and Minoritská streets as well as the gallery overlooking the ground-floor courtyard of the palace, soon became one of the sought-after centers for entertainment in interwar Brno. As a dance café of notably lower quality, Alfa operated until the 1990s, when it, along with the entire building, was restituted to the descendants of the original owners, who have not yet restored café operations within it.