House at the Zwinger

"The concrete presence of searching, clarity, balance, and the strength of space illumination, layering, material, precision of scale, verticality/horizontality, and proportion, tuning and drawing of ideas are essential concepts of architectural thinking for me. Built space is open to these directions. Architecture begins before architecture." (H.Tesar)

There are only a few places in the world - I will refrain from commenting on building plots - whose long-term architectural and urbanistic process was destroyed overnight and then reassembled from the remnants and slowly reconstructed. Fortunately, the sacred preservation of holes and boasting about them during the DDR era is a thing of the past. If something happened at the core, it was in a similar spirit to the Brno Little Spice Market. Tesar's house "Haus am Zwinger" was positioned to introduce a new function into a historical environment. After more than half a century, during which the context of the historical site existed in a latent form, a 170-meter-long commercial complex emerged on the site of St. Sophia's Church, which aspires to shape future urbanism (two new streets have been created that are still waiting to be integrated into the urban structure).
Tesar's house addresses the head and the most available part at Postplatz near the Zwinger (the form is justified by the baroque curves of the former church and acts as a sort of response to the nearby Semper's Glockenspiel Pavilion. The rest is a typical expressionist contagion of the Austrian architect. In Germany, one could already speak of an epidemic or a national curse.