Tribute to Ernst Wiesner

The exhibition featuring contemporary photographs by Filip Šlapal and Ivana Wahly documents unpublished, little-known, and unknown works of one of the most significant representatives of Brno's interwar architecture, Ernst Wiesner.

The exhibition will be opened on Friday, December 16, 2005,
for interested parties there will be a guided tour of the author's works in the city center, meeting at 3 PM in front of the Mahen Theatre,
at 5 PM there will be a lecture at the House of Lords from Kunštát,
at 7 PM in the Architecture Gallery, a festive launch of a monograph on Ernst Wiesner and the opening of the exhibition.

The exhibition will last until January 31, 2006, closed from December 23-26, 2005, and December 30, 2005 - January 2, 2006.



The date of the traditional Christmas exhibition in the Brno Architecture Gallery on the theme of Brno's interwar architecture has been filled this time somewhat unconventionally by the architects' group Obecní dům Brno - "A TRIBUTE TO ERNST WIESNER"

This year in the Architecture Gallery, we will not see the usual period photographs, original plans, and author sketches - these were on display this autumn at the Museum of the City of Brno on Špilberk, and were also used for the monograph published by the Obecní dům Brno group. The exhibition minimally showcases new material that emerged during the work on Ernst Wiesner's monograph.

The current photographs by Filip Šlapal and Ivana Wahly present the latest, unpublished Wiesner works from Liverpool, previously unknown buildings from Brno, and a discovery by Petr Pelčák, the catalog editor, in Velké Meziříčí.
In an audio recording of a radio program marking the hundredth anniversary of the author's birth, we will hear Vladimír Karfík recalling his contemporaries Wiesner, as well as a recent interview between Petr Pelčák and Endré Steiner, an architect of Jewish descent, who still lives in the United States and was awarded an honorary doctorate by Masaryk University in Brno two years ago.

Ernst Wiesner, born in 1890 in Malacky, was one of the most significant Czech architects of the first half of the last century. He was a graduate of the Vienna Academy and lived and created in Brno from 1919.

He is the author of several well-known public buildings in Brno -
- 1920, Moravian Land Life Insurance Company, Mozartova 3,
- in 1922, the Guttmann residential building on Údolní Street, the first Purist building on the territory of Czechoslovakia,
- 1923-25, Czech Union Bank, with a garden on the roof, Beethovenova 4,
- 1927, Palace Morava on Divadelní,
- 1925-30, Brno Crematorium,
- 1931, Moravian Bank on Náměstí Svobody.

Among his residential houses, the most famous is the Neumark villa at Hroznová 19 from 1929.

On March 15, 1939, Ernst Wiesner left his homeland, settled in England, and worked with the Czech exile government in London; after the war, he did not return to Czechoslovakia and died in 1971 in Liverpool.


Renata Vrabelová, www.ga-brno.cz