The house of architect Karel Hubáček in Liberec will open to visitors this summer.

Liberec - The house of architect Karel Hubáček in Lidové sady in Liberec will open to visitors this summer. The Liberec Region bought the house from the heirs at the end of last year, including some furniture and other equipment, several paintings, and also awards that the architect received for his work. The house is secured, a virtual tour has been completed, and currently, a construction-historical survey is underway, Jiří Křížek, director of the North Bohemian Museum in Liberec, which manages the house, said today to ČTK.

Karel Hubáček would have celebrated his hundredth birthday on Friday. He studied architecture in Prague but was largely associated with Liberec in his professional career, where he joined the then Stavoprojekt. In the late 1960s, he was among the founders of Sial, which was able to respond to modern European trends during the normalization period and produced several personalities of Czech architecture. He is credited with a number of buildings. In Liberec, besides the hotel and transmitter on Ještěd, he also designed the now non-existent department store Ještěd and the former ČSOB building on Frýdlantská Street; the cinema in Doksy is also well-known.

Those expecting that the famous architect and author of the futuristic hotel and transmitter lived in an ostentatious villa will be disappointed. He spent a large part of his life in a modest house the size of a 3+1 panel apartment, which he designed himself in the late 1950s. This simple white cube with blue wooden cladding and details is so small that a regular exhibition cannot be held there. Therefore, according to Křížek, the museum plans guided tours for small groups of up to ten people, which will need to be reserved in advance.

"The original project was from 1959 when the city national committee, in cooperation with the Regional Project Institute, came up with the idea of creating a prototype of a prefabricated house that would then be sold throughout Czechoslovakia as a construction kit. At that time, there was nothing like it on the construction market; collective housing, panel houses, and apartment buildings were preferred. It was a revolutionary initiative that was ahead of its time," Křížek said. The construction of the house was financed by the city of Liberec and it was opened to the public as part of the Liberec Exhibition Markets in 1961.

"It was an experimental building where local resources were used, such as slate, which was pressed on-site into construction panels. We can imagine the house as a cube formed by steel beams, lintels, and girders, into which panels are inserted as infill," Knížek described the technology. Thanks to its load-bearing steel structure, the house was variable; it had a sliding wall between the bedrooms and could be used as a standalone structure, as well as for creating duplex houses or row houses, and an additional floor could be added. The construction was supposed to cost 70,000 crowns, which was then the price of an apartment in a panel house. However, it ended up costing about double that.

The design of the house was developed by Karel Hubáček with Vlastimil Šedý, Josef Patrman, and Václav Bůžek, but the project of a simple modernist prefabricated cube was ahead of its time and ultimately was not successful; people did not trust the technology. "No one came forward to take over the patent and start offering the house, so it remained just a prototype," Křížek said. In 1962, Hubáček moved in and spent the rest of his life there with his family. He gradually revealed the weaknesses of the project, so the house underwent modifications - it received cladding to reduce heat loss and also a sloped roof.