The exhibition at the South Bohemian Museum will showcase the famous villas of the region

České Budějovice - The famous villas of the South Bohemian Region will be presented at an exhibition in the South Bohemian Museum in České Budějovice starting Thursday. The exhibition, through which the authors discovered previously unknown works by renowned architects, will last until January 6. People can also learn about fifty of the most significant family buildings by Czech and foreign architects in South Bohemia through the book of the same name.
"When we say South Bohemia, we imagine beautiful landscapes and then monuments from Gothic to Neo-Gothic. But the association of South Bohemia with modern architecture hasn't happened until now," said one of the exhibition's authors, Rostislav Švácha, to journalists today. Initially, he could only recall six significant villas in South Bohemia. Together with his colleagues Eva Erbanová and Milan Šilhan, they managed to select 50 very significant villas from the 19th and 20th centuries through almost detective work. Unexpectedly, they included the Renaissance chateau of Kratochvíle in the exhibition as the first.
"The biggest discovery was Raab's villa in Písek by the famous Slovak architect Dušan Jurkovič. Two major monographs on Jurkovič were published in Slovakia in the early 1990s, and Raab's villa is not mentioned in either of them at all. This also shows how significant a discovery this is," Švácha noted. He emphasized that the book is essentially the first comprehensive publication on modern architecture in South Bohemia. The book Famous Villas of the South Bohemian Region not only focuses on architects but also on the people who commissioned impressive villas to be built.
The exhibition and book cover a total of 21 locations in South Bohemia. The largest number of important buildings - 18 in total - were created by architects in České Budějovice. Both Tábor and Písek can boast four significant villas, three are located in Jindřichův Hradec and Planá nad Lužnicí, and two in Český Krumlov. Therefore, the authors want to present the exhibition as a traveling one in other towns of the region. "Currently, entrepreneurial Baroque absolutely prevails, but there are already a few quality realizations in South Bohemia that we present in the last section," noted another author, Milan Šilhan.
The artistic agency Foibos intends to publish a book about 50 famous villas from each region. So far, materials have been published about villas in Prague, Brno, and the Olomouc Region. "In 2009, we want to create a summary exhibition of Famous Villas of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia," said the agency's vice-chairman Oldřich Janota.