<JINDŘICH KUMPOŠT 1891–1968>

ARCHITECTURE GALLERY, Starobrněnská 16 / 18, Brno
December 20, 2006 - January 30, 2007; Opening of the exhibition on December 19 at 6 PM
The Association of the Municipal House Brno has been working on its own educational and publishing project since 1998, that is, for the last 9 years, aimed at documenting and making interwar modern architecture in Brno and Moravia accessible to both expert and lay audiences. Although Brno is well-known abroad as a European center of avant-garde architecture, in the Czech Republic itself, there is practically no literature that addresses the phenomenon of Brno's avant-garde. The aim of the project by the Municipal House Brno is to change this state and to prepare one exhibition each year, accompanied by a bound publication always presenting the work of a significant architect or creative group from interwar Brno and Moravia. Since 1998, exhibitions and publications have been realized:
Otto Eisler (1998)
Jan Víšek (1999)
Brno's Jewish Architects (2000)
The First Graduates of the Czech School of Architecture in Brno (2001)
Václav Dvořák, Vilém and Alois Kuba, Brno Builders of the 1930s (2002)
Lubomír and Čestmír Šlapetové (2003)
Josef Polášek (2004)
Ernst Wiesner (2005)
These publications have been highly rated by reviews in various Czech newspapers and magazines, some even by foreign reviews (Otto Eisler, Brno's Jewish Architects - Switzerland, Slovenia, Josef Polášek - Germany). The progress of the publishing and exhibition project so far corresponds to the intention of its organizer, the Municipal House Brno, as the exhibitions in the Brno Architecture Gallery are widely attended and raise and increase public interest in architecture, while the publications are favorably assessed by experts and document and make accessible the previously unknown and undescribed areas of our 20th-century culture.

In 2006, an exhibition and accompanying publication titled Jindřich Kumpošt 1891 - 1968 will be realized. Jindřich Kumpošt is a key figure for Brno's modern architecture of the interwar period. After returning from his studies at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, he became the chief architect of the city in 1920, and from this position, he initiated a modern and progressive orientation of Brno's building culture and urbanism. Under his auspices and at his invitation, other young modern architects (J. Grunt, J. Víšek, J. Polášek, etc.) came to the Brno authorities, and in 1923, Bohuslav Fuchs also came to the Brno magistrate at his invitation. In the 1920s and 1930s, Kumpošt realized several modern buildings in Brno that shaped its current image, such as both buildings of the polyclinic on Nerudova Street, the semicircular group of apartment buildings on Vaňkově Square, the Savoy and Opera cafes, row housing in Tábor, military aviation barracks in Slatina, and a large number of family and rental houses. Since the 1930s, there has been an increasing interest in urban planning, which he has devoted himself to entirely in leading roles in planning departments of the Regional National Committee since 1945. From 1945 to 1949, he lectured on regional planning at the Technical University in Brno and since 1935 had been a member of the Czechoslovak group of CIAM. Jindřich Kumpošt, as one of the most important initiators and representatives of Brno's interwar modernism as well as modern urban planning in our country, occupies a significant place in the history of Czechoslovak modern architecture of the 20th century. However (or perhaps precisely for this reason), his work has not yet been comprehensively processed and published. The monograph and exhibition on Jindřich Kumpošt will thus fill another blank spot in the historiography of our Czech modern architecture and urbanism.
The exhibition and the exhibition catalog are being prepared in cooperation with the Museum of the City of Brno.