Vila Olgy and Bedřich Beneš

The villa of the Beneš couple represented, in its time, a distinctive evaluation of the most progressive impulses of European architecture, and even today it cannot be denied its relevance. Its authors studied at the Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering of the Czech Technical University in Brno and shared a common studio before the war. In 1936, Beneš arrived as a scholar in Paris and became a draftsman in the legendary studio of Le Corbusier on rue de Sevres. Beneš adapted the size and layout of the villa so that his brother and his wife, two single sisters Anna and Marie, and himself could live together. He reserved the entire floor for the couple, divided the ground floor into four units, one of which served as a passage, and two side units for the sisters, while the remaining unit was left for himself. He accessed the floor through an outdoor two-armed staircase on the garden side, framed by a concrete panel extending far beyond the façade and connected to it by a massive concrete canopy. The pendant of the staircase was a suspended balcony of a segmental shape on the opposite side to the road, detached from the perimeter wall and accessible via a narrow bridge. A larger part of the longitudinal two-wing floor comprised a continuous living space, while the rest was occupied by ancillary facilities. This solution allowed for the use of exceptional constructions, combining steel, concrete, and wood. Beneš pushed the steel pillars to the outside of the concrete walls and installed wooden beams of the ceilings into their pockets. With the help of steel braces, he could also suspend the balcony freely into the space. The Řícmanice villa represented the most successful work among the realizations of Czech practitioners with Le Corbusier. It was not only inspired by the master's purist phase, but also included his then-beginning brutalist tendency.
prof. PhDr. Jan Sedlák, CSc.

> Functionalist villa by architect Vladimír Beneš is for sale [28.8.2012]