Jarušek's house

The builder of the house was Karel Jarušek (1877-1944), who moved with his family from Prague to Brno in 1901, where he became the director of the administration of Lidové noviny. Actively engaged both commercially and socially, Jarušek purchased a plot of land at Palackého třída 65 (formerly no. 24) from the Královo Pole Sokol organization, of which he also served as chairman for some time. He commissioned one of the leading figures of Czech modern architecture for the design of the apartment building. The project, dated August 25, 1909, is the first of two buildings by Gočár in Brno. Nineteen years later, on the occasion of the Exhibition of Contemporary Culture in Czechoslovakia, he built a pavilion for the Academy of Fine Arts in Brno. Jarušek's house belongs to the early period of Gočár's work. Its significance lies primarily in the artistic approach to the façade. The three-winged layout with a central entrance hall, followed at the back by the space of a two-armed staircase, does not bring anything groundbreaking from a spatial perspective. However, the use of reinforced concrete in the construction of the building was a novelty.
The main façade with four window axes is emphasized by a right-angled bay window on two polygonal columns and culminates in a projecting cornice. The originally designed two-tone cladding of the bay window (black) and the ground floor (white) was realized only in the black opaxit tiles of the bay window and the ground floor. The plinth, polygonal pillars, and the entrance reveal were clad in marble. The bay windows in the extreme axes are geometrically divided, while in the bay itself, there are wide arched windows with a motif of a double arcade with a medallion.
Just as the black opaxit cladding has not survived, so the white marble cladding of the columns and plinth is slowly disappearing today. The insensitivity of the window replacement has irreversibly damaged the original façade of the house.