Karel Hubáček brilliantly "extended the mountain" and gave Ještěd its face.

Prague – "The initial idea burst forth from me. I knew I had to extend the mountain. And give the transmitter the shape of a cone, so that the winds could slide over it. Ještěd is an extremely windy mountain, and a classical wall would serve much worse," recalled the creator of the mountain hotel with a television transmitter on Ještěd, architect Karel Hubáček. One of the most original architectural works in the Czech Republic, a 94-meter high hyperboloid with a circular floor plan of 33 meters in diameter, uniquely combines the functions of a transmitter, hotel, and restaurant, and continues to captivate both experts and laypeople with the way the building completes the silhouette of the 1012-meter high mountain. Hubáček, one of the most significant Czech architects of the post-war period and the founder of the famous SIAL studio, which inspired many other architects, was born 100 years ago, on February 23, 1924, in Prague. He passed away in Liberec in November 2011 at the age of 87.

Hubáček, who has a number of other buildings to his credit, will likely remain inextricably linked primarily to the Ještěd transmitter. Its elegant conical shape, reminiscent of a rocket and visible even in Czech illustrations of stories about Neználka, earned Hubáček the prestigious Auguste Perret Prize from the International Union of Architects in 1969. The jury appreciated not only the sober and timeless elegance but also the practical use of modern technologies employed in the construction. The transmitter and hotel were opened in 1973.

"We were all designing two buildings at that time," recalled another architect from the SIAL studio and long-time collaborator of Hubáček, Otakar Binar, who was also the author of the interior of Ještěd. "He came up with the idea of uniting it into one whole in the shape of a rotating hyperboloid, actually completing the shape of the mountain. That was unique." Hubáček himself spoke in public about his most famous work rather rarely. "I prefer to look than to speak," said the modest Prague native.

At the time he was designing the transmitter, Karel Hubáček had nearly 15 years of work experience with the Liberec Stavoprojekt, where he ended up by chance after graduating from ČVUT. "There was simply a free spot there," he said years ago in Reflex. He similarly stumbled into architecture, which he completed at the end of the 1940s in just seven semesters instead of the usual five years.

In Liberec, he began with smaller buildings, especially schools, to which he devoted much attention compared to the practices of the time and did not settle for just standardized buildings. Hubáček gained significant experience, having witnessed the harsh realities of forced labor during the war, as well as in factory construction. And when he began drawing the Ještěd transmitter (he was yet not 35 years old), he did not hesitate to take risks by ignoring the competition’s requirements, which stipulated two separate buildings for the hotel and transmitter at the mountain's peak.

However, his gamble paid off. In a survey conducted in 2000 among domestic experts, it was declared the most significant Czech building of the 20th century, and its author placed fourth in the voting for the most significant personality of Czech architecture of the last century; he was the only living architect to make it into the elite ten. In 2005, the Ještěd building was declared a national cultural monument, and Liberec and the Liberec region are seeking its inclusion on the UNESCO list.

Less fortunate than the transmitter was another of Hubáček's buildings that also shaped the appearance of Liberec for many years. The Ještěd department store in the very center of the city, completed in 1979, survived only three decades. The massive brown-yellow building was not well received by the public, nor did its fragmented internal layout meet current needs. Only a portion of the professional community protested against the demolition of the building, which was ultimately replaced by another interchangeable commercial structure.

In 1969, Hubáček founded the SIAL studio with his colleague Miroslav Masák, known also as Školka SIAL. The studio gained worldwide renown, and several generations of widely recognized Czech architects emerged from this school.

In addition to the transmitter on Ještěd, other realizations by Hubáček remain, such as the bank on Frýdlantská Street in Liberec, the interior of the Naivní divadlo in Moscow Street, the city cinema in Doksy, or the cultural house with a concert hall in Teplice. Traces of Karel Hubáček can also be found in Prague (the waterworks balancing tower in Dívčí hrady or the meteorological tower in Libuš), and even in Aden, Yemen, for which he designed another transmitter together with Dalibor Vokáč and Zdeněk Patrman. Typical features of Hubáček's work include glass fragmented domes (the cultural house in Teplice) or elongated window shapes (the Ještěd transmitter).

From 1990 to 1991, Hubáček was the director of SIAL, with which he collaborated until 2000. In 1993, he received an honorary doctorate in technical sciences from ČVUT in Prague, and from 1994 to 1997, he was head of the architecture department at the Faculty of Art and Architecture at TU in Liberec, where he habilitated as an associate professor in 1995 at VŠUP in Prague.

He had two sons with his wife, who worked as a curator in a gallery, and spent a significant part of his life in Liberec.