Plzeň - There has been a great deal of interest among both amateurs and experts in the interior tours designed by the world-famous architect Adolf Loos in apartments in Plzeň during the First Republic. The city and a private owner opened two tour routes this April that take visitors to three interiors designed by Loos. Although the tours have a small number of people in groups and are held three times a week during the season and twice a week off-season, more than 10,000 people visited from April to the end of October. This was stated to journalists today by the director of the city organization Plzeň - TURISMUS, Zuzana Koubíková.
In November, the West Bohemian Gallery made another apartment, the Semler residence, accessible to the public. Opening Loos's interiors to the public was one of the flagship projects of the European Capital of Culture. "As late as 2000, the connection between Adolf Loos and Plzeň was known only to true experts; today, thanks to the opening of these apartments, Plzeň is on the map of modern world architecture," said Martin Baxa (ODS), the mayor's deputy for culture. The largest collection of Loos apartments is in Vienna, but it is not open to the public. Nowhere else can the architect's original residential concepts be seen to such an extent as in Plzeň. "Today we can say that we have managed to dust off this long-forgotten gem and symbolically add it to the permanent cultural and tourist offerings in the city," Baxa added.
According to Koubíková, Plzeň has created a separate marketing product from Loos in tourism. For 2016, the operators are preparing a joint ticket that will allow visitors to complete all three tour routes at a discounted price of up to 400 crowns; currently, the individual tours of the three routes cost a total of 560 crowns.
Half of the visitors were individual tourists, and the other half were booked groups. A large portion were foreign tourists, mostly from German-speaking countries. According to Koubíková, the accessibility of Loos's interiors has certainly contributed to a 126% year-on-year increase in the number of Austrian tourists in Plzeň this year.
Visitors have the opportunity to view the apartment of the Kraus couple at Bendova 10 and the apartment of Dr. Vogel at Klatovská 12, the private Brummel house at Husova 58, and the newly opened Semler residence at Klatovská třída 110. This is the only one of Plzeň's realizations where the principle of spatial organization of floors - the so-called raumplan - was used.