Czech Republic Guide
South Moravia
Výstaviště
Website: www.bvv.cz
Southwest of the city centre, where the River Svratka opens up to the plain (tram #1 from the station), is the Výstaviště or exhibition grounds. The main buildings were laid out in 1928 for the city's Exhibition of Contemporary Culture, and most of the leading Czech architects of the day were involved in the scheme, which prompted a flurry of functionalist building projects across the city's burgeoning suburbs.
As you approach the concave entrance to the trade fair grounds, you're greeted by Atomový věk (Atomic Age), a classic Social Realist sculpture on a towering plinth. Inside the grounds, the first building you come to is Pavilón A, a vast exhibition hall built in 1928, with distinctive concrete parabolic arches; two constructivist red-brick buildings, to the south, also date from the original 1928 exhibition. At the end of the main avenue, you'll find the two postwar additions which have kept closest to the spirit of the original concept: Pavilón G, with its glass encased tower, a 1990s reconstruction of an original 1928 building, and the circular crystal-and-concrete Pavilón Z, the largest building on the site. The only building which predates the exhibition is the eighteenth-century zámek, which features a marble hall on the ground floor designed in 1924 by Brno-born arch-minimalist Adolf Loos.
The part of the 1928 exhibition that really caused a sensation was the Nový dům settlement, worth a look if you're keen on Bauhaus-style architecture. Inspired by the Weissenhofsiedlung built a year earlier in Stuttgart, Bohuslav Fuchs and various others designed a series of boxy, white, concrete villas by the woods of the Wilsonův les, north of Výstaviště, up Žabovřeská (tram #1 from Výstaviště), in the streets of Drnovická and Petřvaldská. The brief for each architect was to create modest two-storey houses for middle-income families, using standard fittings and ordinary materials to keep the unit cost down. Many are now grey, peeling and overrun by vegetation, and it takes a leap of imagination to appreciate the shock of the new that these buildings must have aroused at the time.