The art and architecture historian Iloš Crhonek has died

Iloš Crhonek at the Tugendhat villa, Brno, April 11, 2012. Photo: Dagmar Černoušková, private archive

founder of the architecture collection and initiator of the establishment of the Department of Architectural History at the Museum of the City of Brno.

The art historian and architectural theorist PhDr. Iloš Crhonek was born on January 10, 1932, in Brno. From 1952 to 1957, he studied art history at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University in Prague. He completed his studies with a thesis on Jan Kotěra, the founder of Czech modern architecture. The theme of his thesis foreshadowed his lifelong professional interest. After returning to Brno, he worked from the late 1950s at the House of Art of the City of Brno, where he participated in the conception of exhibitions of Czech avant-garde art of the 20th century. At the same time, he was tasked with leading the Cabinet of Architecture at the House of Lords from Kunštát, where he prepared a number of exhibitions mostly dedicated to contemporary architectural creation. However, he soon realized that the scale and significance of Brno's architecture both in the present and in the past were so substantial that it required the establishment of a permanent theoretical and historical workplace, preferably of a museum type. After lengthy discussions, he transferred to the Museum of the City of Brno, where in 1962 (December 1) he founded and led for thirty years, but primarily built and profiled the Department of Architectural History. Initially, Iloš Crhonek directed the department's acquisitions towards documentation of the construction of the city of Brno after 1945. This included works by architects living and working in Brno, especially plans, photographs, and models, which were meant to document recent and contemporary construction production and culminate in a catalog of realizations by Brno architects, design institutes, and construction companies. The first year of the department's existence was the most difficult for its operation. Iloš Crhonek had to establish contact with institutions and companies willing to provide materials for the collection funds. At the same time, he had to ensure their appropriate storage and choose a clear system of records, cataloging, and inventorying. In this, he could rely only on his own experience, since the National Technical Museum in Prague, then the only Czechoslovak museum institution managing the architecture collection, recorded its extensive holdings in large, research-difficult units.

The concentration, and above all the exceptional quality of buildings from the interwar period, many of which were beginning to deteriorate or were being remodeled, soon prompted Iloš Crhonek to change the original concept. He focused on Brno's architecture of the interwar period. Significant impulses certainly included the declaration of the first buildings from this period as cultural monuments in 1963. He began to collect architectural studies, planning documentation, photographs including negatives, correspondence, and models of buildings, as well as other documents related to the architecture of Brno in the 1920s and 1930s. The first significant acquisition was the archive of architect Bohumil Babánek. Following that were the archives of figures from the Brno architectural avant-garde, such as Otto Eisler, Bohuslav Fuchs, František Lýdie Gahura, Jaroslav Grunt, František Kalivoda, Emil Králík, Jiří Kroha, Jindřich Kumpošt, Mojmír Kyselka, Josef Polášek, Oskar Poříska, Bedřich Rozehnal, Jan Víšek, Ernst Wiesner, and many others. Moreover, Iloš Crhonek had the opportunity to contact most of the architects whose work peaked in the interwar period directly, as many remained professionally active. He personally arranged for the transfer of their archives to the Museum of the City of Brno. Sometimes, however, the acquisition of collections took place under dramatic circumstances, with valuable materials rescued just before destruction. This commitment by Crhonek was all the more commendable, as many archival sources documenting the construction history of the city from the 19th century to the early 1940s were lost in the fire at the city building authority's archive at the end of World War II. A uniquely significant place in the collection fund of interwar architecture is occupied by the planning documentation for the Tugendhat villa, the acquisition and de facto rescue of which from destruction is exclusively credited to Iloš Crhonek. He also enriched the collection fund with numerous unique and extraordinary items, such as a set of designs by Le Corbusier or a project for an unrealized residential building for Brno by the native Adolf Loos, including the author's correspondence with the builder. Additionally, he managed to obtain sets or individual pieces of furniture created according to the designs of Marcel Breuer, Adolf Loos, Dušan Jurkovič, Emil Králík, Jan Kotěra, and Jan Vaňek. Thus, there is a unique collection at the Museum of the City of Brno featuring original sketches, drawings, studies, competition entries, projects, photographs, correspondence, and furniture artifacts.

Iloš Crhonek carried out his work under a political regime in which representatives of the interwar avant-garde were silenced, stripped of university positions, politically persecuted, and their works were devalued. Despite this, he managed to fulfill a task that no one had assigned him because he imposed it on himself. Even the ideological objections of the time towards the architectural modernism of the First Republic did not prevent him from organizing exhibitions of architects representing the international style and publishing contributions about their work. In addition to around forty exhibitions, mostly at the House of Art and the House of Lords from Kunštát, he wrote several standalone monographs and catalogs, including Profiles of Brno Architects I and II (1965 and 1967); Brno Exhibition Grounds. Construction of the site 1928–1968 (1968); Schools of the South Moravian Region 1945–1970 (1971); Architect Emil Králík (1988); Architect Zdeněk Řihák (1992); Bohuslav Fuchs. Lifelong Work (1995); Functionalist Palace of the Moravian Bank in Brno (1998); Brno at the Turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries (2021). His ongoing publishing enthusiasm is evidenced by the release last year of the book Functionalist Architecture of Interwar Brno (2024), temporally connecting with the publication from 2021. He contributed to the preparation of two dozen television documentaries on Brno's modern architecture, which he promoted in other media or through lectures for both professional and lay audiences.

Through his enlightened collecting activities, Iloš Crhonek significantly contributed to overcoming the fifty-year developmental gap in Czech architecture and to the restoration of its democratic tradition. He built a workplace that, in a museum form, presents not only the architectural works of interwar Brno but also returns values to Czech culture that reflect supreme invention and free individual creativity. For his many years of work at the Museum of the City of Brno and the cultural contributions of lasting significance, he received the City of Brno Award in the field of architecture and urbanism in 2010. However, he valued most highly the recognition that came from one of the most significant architects of his time, which Iloš Crhonek recalled: One morning around 1970, a man called and said, “I have decided to give you the archive of my lifelong work.” The caller was Bohuslav Fuchs. His decision was an expression of trust and an acknowledgment of the workplace focused on the history and development of modern architecture in Brno.

Thanks to the founding act and tireless work of Iloš Crhonek, today the Department of Architectural History at the Museum of the City of Brno rightfully ranks alongside not only the National Technical Museum in Prague but also similarly focused cultural institutions worldwide. It attracts the attention of both domestic and foreign experts, not only in the field of modern interwar architecture.