<m>Architect Milan Rejchl has died</m>

The architect Milan Rejchl has passed away (August 9, 1936 – July 22, 2025)

Milan Rejchl was born in Hradec Králové to the prominent architect Jan Rejchl, who was the author of several significant buildings in the city (the branch of the National Bank, the train station building, the glass institute, and numerous apartment and family houses). After World War II, Jan Rejchl co-founded the Eastern Bohemian Stavoprojekt, where he worked from the 1950s to the 1970s. Jan Rejchl had an older brother Václav, who was also an architect and builder, and their father was Václav Rejchl Sr., a builder who participated in the development of the modern city of Hradec Králové.

Milan Rejchl graduated from the Faculty of Architecture and Civil Engineering in the 1950s, where his teachers included Karel Honzík, Jindřich Krise, and Antonín Ausobský, who maintained the continuity of interwar avant-garde during the harsh Stalinist era. After a brief stint in Hradec Králové, Milan Rejchl joined the Prague Project Institute, where he became a member of the team designing the experimental housing estate Invalidovna. Here, Rejchl was tasked with designing a community center with shops, a supermarket, and a restaurant. At the Prague Project Institute, Rejchl participated in a competition for a prototype funeral hall for rural communities, where he received a top award. While still at the Institute, he began working on the preparation phases of the Hotel Prague project, which became an iconic piece of architecture in the 1980s with elements of organic design and brutalism. In 1963, he met his father on a competition project for the spa colonnade in Karlovy Vary, and he also collaborated with his future wife Dagmar. In the 1960s, he scored several successes in competitions for atrium terrace houses, which were primarily announced for the hilly terrain of Prague. He participated several times in the urban planning of Prague: he took part in the competition for a transport terminal at Hradčanská and for the regulation of Jižní město. In the first half of the 1970s, he created some of his most valuable realizations: the villa of Jan Kodeš in Dejvice and the extension of the Stop motel. In 1977, he began teaching with a brief episode at the Faculty of Civil Engineering at the Czech Technical University in Prague, where he later led the Institute of Design. The academic environment allowed him several trips abroad to the West, where he was particularly interested in atrium architecture and passive houses, which he advocated since the 1980s. He continued working on the commission for Hotel Prague and on the building of the consolidation agency, which he also began at the end of his tenure at the Institute. In the 1980s, large projects were added, such as the Winter Sports Center and the Uran hotel in Harrachov.

In 1993, Milan Rejchl founded a private studio and focused on designing private passive houses. However, the 1990s also included larger projects, such as the Pyramida hotel near Františkovy Lázně and the completion and renovation of the Plzeňský Prazdroj headquarters in Plzeň. The last major completed project was, in the second decade of the 21st century, the adaptation of the consolidation agency into the headquarters of the Galileo satellite system. Throughout his career, he maintained contact with Hradec Králové and Eastern Bohemia: until the late 1970s, he collaborated on several projects with his father Jan Rejchl and subsequently designed various projects for Hradec Králové with the aim of continuing the modernist concept of the city. His creed was to fill the urban structure with multifunctional buildings to prevent urban centers from becoming depopulated. He was able to respond to the challenges of the times and sought to find solutions to various social problems through architectural means: when the war broke out in Ukraine in 2022, he proposed adapting his earlier unrealized senior housing project into housing for Ukrainian refugees with children.

Milan Rejchl valued collaboration with many colleagues, approaching architecture as a collective work. Throughout his life, he collaborated with visual artists: Marie Rychlíková, Děvana Mírová, Lýdia Hladíková, Vladimír Kýn, Jan Koblas, and others. He was also artistically active, focusing on watercolors (particularly from trips to Italy, the Adriatic, Greece, etc.), painting (abstract and surrealist compositions), and more recently, ceramics.

Many will remember Milan Rejchl as a kind educator, approachable colleague, optimist, and a creative and industrious person, whose passing also marks the loss of a piece of the history of Czech architecture in the 20th century.

Ladislav Jackson