Reconstruction of Café Era

The renovation of café ERA in Černé Polí dark represents a significant moment not only in the history of this monument but also in the context of the entire heritage of Brno’s interwar architecture. Under the project of the architectural studio Velek, Velková, Velek architects, it has been possible to sensitively restore the building and its interior to nearly its original form, especially its function. It is an authentic building incorporated into the intact urban environment of a sought-after residential district, as well as being close to other significant interwar era monuments, including Villa Tugendhat and nearby school complexes by Bohuslav Fuchs and Mojmír Kyselka.

At the time when the only twenty-seven-year-old graduate of the Czech Technical University in Brno, architect Josef Kranz, designed this elegant and exceptional building for café owner and restaurateur Josef Špunar, the tradition of Brno cafés was reaching its social and cultural peak.

The first café in the city was opened as early as 1702. Throughout the 19th century, the popularity of coffee sharply increased. Granting a license to operate a café was simultaneously linked with the offer of both domestic and foreign daily press with which guests could familiarize themselves. Thus, the café environment transcended local hospitality, becoming a source of information, a place for discussion, and a platform for the dissemination of cosmopolitan modern culture. This extraordinary flourishing of café culture during the First Republic can be explained by its inseparable connection to the top works of interwar architectural creativity.

Thanks to the successful revitalization, café ERA today belongs to several rare and publicly accessible environments in the city where we can uninterruptedly perceive and experience the ambiance of interwar architecture, whereas with many other buildings we are today left with only a few archival photographs and plans, such as the phenomenal Café Esplanade (1926-27) by Ernst Wiesner.

The façade of the café is particularly distinguished by its proportional balance and graphically subtle division, which is characteristic of all solutions in the distinctive and exceptionally high-quality oeuvre of Josef Kranz’s constructed works. Common comparisons of café ERA with café De Unie (1924) in Rotterdam by J. J. P. Oud lead us to ponder how the two buildings differ significantly from each other. The café De Unie, destroyed during bombardment in 1940, now exists only as a façade, restored in 1986 based on archival materials. Even so, it remains an irreplaceable piece of Dutch neoplasticism of the De Stijl movement.

What particularly captivates us is the absolute purity of Kranz’s architectural expression. The façade of ERA forgoes any self-serving artistic details, cornices, consoles, or color effects. The entire geometric impact exists solely in a single spatial scheme. The façade forms a clean, smooth, and austere rectangle, punctuated by delicately profiled window openings in shallow reveals. Part of the intention was also an absolutely suppressed colorfulness, limited only to white plaster and gray window frames. Almost every contemporary architect is still astonished at how limited an artistic vocabulary of forms and materials can carry such refined impact. The façade compels us to ask what the secret of its elegance really lies in. It is undoubtedly in the tension between the free surfaces of white plaster and glazing, in the subtlety of the steel window frames and fine thin strip windows that delicately underscore the horizontal division. All the details logically fit together; the building possesses a discernible strict order while simultaneously having individuality and artistic playfulness of an abstract image.

It is generally thought that the façade of a functionalist building sensitively responds to the arrangement of the interior space of the building and reflects its layout outwards. However, anyone who can perceive the character of interwar creation knows well that the issue is more complex. In reality, there has never been a consistent method for projecting the internal arrangement of a building onto its façade. It is always an artistic experiment that offers a wide range of possibilities and variations.

The dominant surfaces of large windows create a diagonal composition that extends from the lower left corner of the façade upward toward the upper right corner, where it culminates with the strip window of the café owner’s living room. The left upper corner of the façade remains free, as do the large surfaces around the entrance area, which are only divided by small horizontal windows of the auxiliary rooms. The only vertical element of the façade—a vertical strip of glass block—is a characteristic period accent, emphasizing the location of the staircase.

Thus, the façade practically does not allow us to more accurately estimate the arrangement of the interior space; it merely gives us a hint of what takes place inside while simultaneously provoking in us a certain tension and curiosity but, above all, it enhances our imagination and invites us to enter and experience the character of the interior, the play of light, space, and color.

In this regard, the façade promises nothing that the interior space cannot richly and surprisingly fulfill. In its time, the space of cafés continued from the street, serving as a stage for social rituals, a space that is not only architectural and physical but equally—as perhaps even more—a space for meeting and exchanging ideas. It is thus a maximally free space, visually connected to the street and highlighted by the play of light and shadows on the smooth surfaces of the structures, endowed with perfectly polished plaster finishes. The color that is absent from the façade takes on a dominant role inside. We cannot help but feel that on the façade of the building, cold reason prevails, while in the interior space, artistically organized emotions take control. This is a deliberate and unexpected contrast—a surprise that does not leave us entirely indifferent, even when we are well acquainted with period black-and-white photographs and drawings. At the center of the layout stands the dominant object of a dramatic reinforced concrete staircase in lightly organic to sculptural forms, complemented by a single square column in black color. Diffused light glides over the metallic blue of the cylindrical railing, whose soft spiral transitions into the plane of the ceiling with two rounded, relatively small, yet all the more impressive leads, while the red steps seem to flow from the upper floor to the ground floor, reminiscent of hot lava. The forms of period automobile bodies may lightly come to mind; after a moment, however, we begin to think slowly about the latest organic and sculptural tendencies in contemporary architecture… perhaps about the works of Zdeněk Fránek.

The original floors in the café were made of a layer of period material known as xylolith, a mix of so-called Sorel cement and sawdust, with the flooring being colored in mass to a red hue and needing to be regularly treated with floor wax, giving it a silky shine. This technology is now practically unusable; therefore, it has been replaced with poured thin-layer epoxy coatings of a similar hue. The original color was likely somewhat less saturated and similar red shades were widely used, for example in the Avion hotel, while in the auxiliary space of Petrák’s villa by B. Fuchs, we can still find an unusual yellow hue of the same material. In any case, the entire atmosphere of the café recalls the legendary Hotel Avion, which was created almost simultaneously and still awaits its renewal. Josef Kranz practiced and collaborated on the design of the structure with Fuchs, whose internal microcosm is still a textbook example of architectural space and refined work with natural light.

During the reconstruction, a noticeable shift occurred in the perception of the café's operation: the original glass block wall at the back was replaced with transparent glazing, and additionally, doors were added to the rear wall, allowing the café to open more into the garden, where a spacious terrace covered with wooden decking was created, offering outdoor seating isolated from the noise of the street, whereas previously a paved area was utilized more in front of the building. The garden has been newly enclosed with a gray wooden fence.

The original glass block fillings were made from glass bricks presumably produced by the First Czech Glassworks in Kyjov, which had a completely distinctive and characteristic expression and unfortunately an atypical horizontal format today. The resulting light effect was further enhanced by the fact that the bricks were adorned with a typical plastic geometric pattern, with grooves directed inward and small round lenses facing outward. This abstract rational pattern highlighted the today practically unrenewable character of diffused natural light entering the building. The disappearance of glass blocks from the interior deprives the café of something of its former abstract intimacy and represents the most significant interference with the original balanced concept. Fortunately, we can at least experience the authentic impression on the side staircase, where the original material has been fully preserved.

The architectural promenade - to use Le Corbusier's term - continues up the staircase to the upper floor, where bright blue dominates an entire wall with a single window that was originally also characteristically made of glass blocks, while almost the entire façade facing the street is punctuated by two enormous windows. This space originally served as a billiard room and today is supplemented with replicas of the original café booths with marble tables. From here we pass to a spacious rooftop terrace, which, together with a shelter for outdoor furniture, a chimney made of brick, and the original glass block wall of the ground floor, formed the most striking artistic elements of the façade facing the garden.

The former apartment of the café owner on the second floor with the exhibition will become a place that will dignifiedly commemorate the life and work of Josef Kranz in the context of the era.

A tour of the building may somewhat evoke the moment when a historical gramophone from the late 1920s opens before us—externally austere, but inside we find a splendidly wavering silver tonearm, and if we are lucky, we can let the intoxicating rhythms of period music ring out. With the difference that technology hopelessly ages, while architecture still speaks to us in a clear and fresh language.

It would be a great mistake if we were to take only nostalgia for the old days, with the smell of fresh coffee and a gaze turned to the past, from our visit to café ERA. It is precisely Kranz's staircase that serves as a suitable place to reflect on how the architecture of our future should look to be equally modest, open, democratic, and at the same time filled with ideas and refined elegance. We must ask ourselves what aspects of that thinking have become foreign to us and which technologies are outdated, and conversely—what still has something to say to us.