Josef Polášek 1899-1946

The most significant Czech architect of the 20th century in public service
on the exhibition of Josef Polášek, recipient of the ČKA honor in memoriam

"You cannot even imagine life in carefree times." I will probably never forget the words with which architect Jaromír Sirotek characterized the atmosphere of the time and society in which he grew up, the era of interwar Czechoslovakia. A time and society that are also linked to the life and work of Josef Polášek. Of course, it had many other worries beyond those troubling the adolescent representative of the first republic's middle class, Danny Smiřický, created by Josef Škvorecký, namely finding the best bar for listening to jazz and watching young ladies. However, it also had an unbreakable - though soon broken - faith that it could successfully resolve all worries and problems and that this would one day happen given the state of affairs. This faith was based on economic prosperity, which had its roots in the industrialization of the Czech lands in the 19th century, the return of their administration to Czech hands, and the liberal democratic order of Masaryk's Czechoslovakia. The city of Brno was, after Prague, the second center of the young state, characterized by rapid growth, prosperity, and modernity. These are also three defining factors of Josef Polášek's work, alongside Bohuslav Fuchs, Jindřich Kumpošt, Jan Víšek, and Ernst Wiesner, the most important representative of Brno functionalism. In just ten years, which Polášek had to create his life’s work (1929-1939), he built eleven schools and six complexes of houses for the poor in the service of the city of Brno. Thus, incomparably more than any other architect here. However, what is admirable is not just the quantity, but the quality itself. After all, his own family house, together with the Eisler and Kumpošt houses, is among the most beautiful villas built by Brno architects. The stunning banking hall of the First Moravian Savings Bank is still the most beautiful publicly accessible modern interior in the city. The adaptation of the former assembly hall of the provincial estates for the Brno city hall represents one of the first major and successful modern interventions into a historical building in our country.

Polášek's contribution, however, lies not only in his architectural art. He wrote and published two professional publications, collaborated intensively with magazines Index, Žijeme, and Stavitel, was an active member of CIAM and CIRPAC, and a founding member of the Left Front. With his social engagement, he wanted to contribute to solving the problems that he also addressed in his architectural work, namely the problems of the ordinary person. He himself came from a poor environment in Moravian Slovakia. Polášek's fate seems in some ways to be typical of the time. Although from modest rural conditions, he received excellent education and the opportunity to realize his architectural and social ideas. He held an important official position in the Brno city hall. Despite being very and openly critical of several political and social phenomena, it did not affect his official standing. Though as a socially conscious intellectual he was left-leaning, he was not a communist. "The village should get a suitable school, a church, and a proper pub," he says in a radio program during the war. He also displays personal courage at that time by hiding a member of the resistance sought by the Gestapo in his home.
If we can view Polášek's life as an embodiment of the spirit of Czechoslovakia's first republic, then his death on Christmas in 1946 can be understood as a symbolic end to this "carefree time," which allowed people of Polášek's type to grow. The death, which, according to the testimony of the poet Ivan Jelínek, the hardworking and incurably ill architect struggled with and counted on for years, prevented him from experiencing the Asianization of Czech culture in artistic and social terms, the drastic decline of the city for which he accomplished so much, the violation of Czech architecture by the grip of socialist realism, the emigration of sons, and later also of his wife to freedom on the other side of the world, and the destruction of his beautiful house confiscated by a communist apparatchik. The premature death, the change in political conditions, and consequently the emigration of the survivors likely caused the attention given to the work and personality of Josef Polášek to be less than would correspond to his actual contribution.
This exhibition and monograph were created with the desire to change this state and reveal Polášek's significance for Czech modern architecture and interwar Brno. And not just for our time, which is so distant in its values and atmosphere from the time in which he lived and created, as if the distance of less than one human lifetime did not separate them...