The functionalist Ander House in Olomouc will not be a monument

Olomouc - Olomouc conservationists were unsuccessful in their proposal to include the functionalist villa of the former entrepreneur and patron Josef Ander at Svatý Kopeček among the state-protected cultural monuments. According to the Ministry of Culture, the functionalist part of the building has not been preserved in its original form, and its overall structural and technical condition is very poor, said Martina Mertová from the Olomouc office of the National Heritage Institute to ČTK.
The villa was built between 1933 and 1934 according to a design by the prominent Czech architect Bohumír Čermák. According to Mertová, it is a unique example of a functionalist representative residential house, whose artistic value reached the highest level on a scale of the whole of Czechoslovakia and was comparable to the Tugendhat villa in Brno.
"It is paradoxical that although condemned to extinction, it will be included in the publication Famous Villas of the Olomouc Region and will be featured in the upcoming Brno exhibition about the collaboration between entrepreneur and patron Josef Ander and architect Čermák," Mertová noted.
She admitted that the villa and its garden are heavily devastated. "By adding it to the list of monuments, however, the estate would at least be protected from division and preserved as a whole. Reconstruction of all building elements would not be possible anymore, but we would settle for a repair that sensitively uses replicas," Mertlová added.
She stated that the owner of the house since last year is the company Colber Invest, which disagreed with the declaration of a monument. According to the conservationists, the city of Olomouc and the Olomouc Region also did not support the proposal, arguing that the villa's estate is disrupted by a kindergarten building from the 1970s. Additionally, there is a protective zone regime around the Church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary and the former Premonstratensian monastery at Svatý Kopeček.