Czech Republic Guide
South Moravia
Náměstí Svobody
náměstí Svobody has been the city's main square since the early thirteenth century. The medieval church that once stood at its centre was torn down in 1870, leaving only a Baroque plague column. Still, in summer, you can sit out, drink coffee and admire the square's finer buildings, which together span almost four centuries. The earliest is the Dům z panů Lipé (House of the Lords of Lipá), with an ornate Renaissance facade decorated with sgraffito, added as late as 1938. Though the building's arcaded courtyard has been brutally converted into a muzak-filled shopping mall, it's worth venturing inside and taking the lift to the rooftop viewing platform (vyhlídková terasa), which gives great views over the old town, the cathedral and Špilberk. A few doors along, at no. 15, the Kleinův palác was designed around 1848 in neo-Renaissance style by Theophil Hansen, the Danish architect responsible for some of the finest buildings on Vienna's Ringstrasse; the Klein family owned a nearby ironworks, hence the elegant wrought-iron oriel windows held up with miniature Atlantes. Opposite, and lacking in such subtlety, is Dům u čtyř mamlasů (House of the Four Idiots), belonging to another of Brno's richest nineteenth-century Jewish industrialists, whose four muscle-bound employees struggle to hold up both his building and their loincloths. And in the 1930s, the functionalist Moravská banka (now the Komerční banka), designed by Arnošt Wiesner and Bohuslav Fuchs, was erected in the northwest corner of the square.