The building of the General Pension Institute offered a range of amenities

Publisher
ČTK
13.07.2018 21:00

Business card of the House of Trade Unions in Prague's Žižkov, which has now been sold by the unionists:

A monumental functionalist palace, dominating the lower part of Žižkov, was built in the early 1930s according to the winning project by Josef Havlíček and Karel Honzík. The architects, who were not yet 30 years old at the time, designed a reinforced concrete building with a cross-shaped floor plan for the General Pension Institute, which is often referred to as the first Czech skyscraper due to its height of 52 meters. The facade, clad in ceramic tiles, resembles many other Prague buildings from that era, such as the Ministry of Interior in Letná or the Electric Works building in Holešovice.
The General Pension Institute, which provided invalid and old-age insurance for private employees, originally resided on today's Rašínovo embankment in a building constructed just before the start of World War I according to the designs of Jan Kotěra and Josef Zasche. By the late 1920s, however, due to the growing number of clients, it required a new headquarters. The project by Havlíček and Honzík, who had never built anything of such magnitude before, managed to prevail not only despite the reserved stance of part of the expert public but also because it did not comply with the city's requirements for a block layout.
The construction of the functionalist building, which rose on the site where two vineyard estates and later the Prague municipal gasworks once stood, took two years. Between spring and autumn 1932, the reinforced concrete structure was first completed, followed by brick partitions during the subsequent winter, so that in the spring of 1933, workers could begin installing the necessary technologies and tile facade. In early February 1934, officials began moving in, and on March 5 of the same year, the institute started operations in its new headquarters.
"The building was equipped with the most modern technology, including air conditioning from the American company Carrier. There were observation sun terraces on the flat roofs, and a modern conference hall became part of the house," wrote architectural historian Zdeněk Lukeš about the palace. Thanks to the cross-shaped floor plan, Havlíček and Honzík enabled direct lighting of the offices; the high wings, where six to seven hundred officials worked, were complemented by lower sections with employee apartments and ground-floor commercial spaces facing today's Seifertova street.
In 1948, the building along with the activities of the General Pension Institute was taken over by the Central National Insurance Company. Four years later, sickness insurance was transferred under the management of the unions, which also took ownership of the building. The Žižkov palace then became the headquarters of the Revolutionary Trade Union Movement (ROH) and remained with the unionists even after November 1989, when it received a new name - House of Trade Unions. Now the trade union headquarters has sold the building, which they used for about one-fifth and rented out the rest. The value of the property is estimated at around one billion crowns.

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výročí

05.05.19 07:50

Zapomenutý architekt?

raval

06.05.19 10:10

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16 25.08.2022 | The former trade union house in Prague will not be proposed for higher protection by the ministry