Plzeň - In Plzeň, another apartment designed by the world-renowned architect Adolf Loos at Klatovská Street 110 will open for regular tours starting November 12. After Vienna, Plzeň houses the most of his residential projects, with three currently accessible. Today, the apartment of former co-owner of the wire goods factory and gramophone needles Oskar Semler was presented by the West Bohemian Gallery. The apartment is unique in that it is the only one in Plzeň with a six-story layout featuring smoothly interconnected spaces of various heights, the so-called Raumplan, said architect Petr Domanický to ČTK. Due to his deteriorating health, the prominent architect of his time, Loos (1870 to 1933), likely only established the concept of the apartment from 1931 to 1934. Its realization was led by his student Heinrich Kulka. However, according to Domanický, the apartment simultaneously represents the pinnacle of Loos's work in Plzeň, as it uniquely offers spatial division - Raumplan. Oskar Semler, as the only Plzeň investor, allowed Loos to radically intervene in the purchased house. He was able to demolish some ceilings and insert a completely different space into the house, whose central feature was a two-story hall that seamlessly connects with other spaces. Loos used the same Raumplan concept in the Prague Müller Villa. The apartment had a tumultuous fate during the war and in the following decades. It was divided into four smaller apartments and a non-residential space - the hall was turned into a classroom and then a photo studio; later tenants changed the summer dining room into a kitchen and bathroom. The West Bohemian Gallery, which owns the property, has now made the first modifications to the largely devastated apartment, repairing the roof and installing new systems at a cost of millions of crowns. “We have reconnected the space to its original state, and we have attempted to rehabilitate some of the destroyed areas,” Domanický said. During the tours, visitors will see the main part of the apartment except for the last private floor, where the bedrooms and children's rooms were located. “They will see the most essential part, the Raumplan - five height levels around the living hall,” the architect stated. The spatial arrangement and part of the furnishings have been preserved - built-in furniture, wall coverings, flooring, and parquet made from expensive materials. The builder used various marbles, travertine, ceramics, and rare woods such as Scandinavian birch or one of the most expensive woods from the Indonesian tamala tree, known as makasar. The makasar flooring of the living hall is in critical condition, which is why visitor groups must be limited to ten people. A cubic meter of this raw wood costs up to a million crowns today, according to Domanický. Since the gallery does not have the funds to restore the entire apartment at once, as has been done with similar famous buildings like the Müller Villa in Prague or the Tugendhat Villa in Brno, it is proceeding in stages and has decided to turn this into an advantage. People will be able to observe the gradual restoration of the apartment. So far, the worst interventions from the summer dining room have been removed, and the almost destroyed entrance vestibule with atypical elements has been returned to its original form. The wooden parts of the original guest wardrobe were also on the brink of extinction. The heritage-protected apartment of Oskar Semler is considered a unique example among 20th-century architectural monuments in the Czech Republic. In the future, the West Bohemian Gallery plans to establish a Center for Architecture Research for the Plzeň Region there.
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