Café Era

Outstanding functionalist café in Brno’s Černá Pole.

When the young Josef Kranz designed a residential building with a café for Josef Špunar in 1927, he drew on his knowledge of contemporary Dutch architecture, and above all on the principles of the avant-garde De Stijl movement. In architecture those ideas showed themselves in abstract compositions of right-angled forms, and the façade of Café Era answers to that completely. It is almost poster-like, and it points straight back to the “graphic” architecture of the Dutch group that inspired him.

The café was built between 1928 and 1929. The restaurant occupied the ground floor, the first floor held a café with billiard tables and a terrace, and the owners lived on the second floor, which had a roof terrace of its own. The ground floor is still dominated by the dynamic mass of the spiral staircase. In line with De Stijl thinking, that element stands in for decorative art in the interior, as do the colours chosen for the walls (pale blue and white) and the floor (red magnesite flooring), because here the architectural space itself takes on the role of the abstract artwork.

In 1959 the café was nationalised and began operating as a beer hall. In the 1970s the building passed to the University of Agriculture, today’s Mendel University, and fell into disrepair. Even being listed as a cultural monument in 1977 did not halt the decline. It sadly continued to suffer further damage, this time from insensitive building work, after it was returned to the original owner’s descendants in 1991.

A full restoration of this remarkable building took place in the early 2000s and revived the form that Josef Kranz originally gave it. The work was led between 2009 and 2011 by architect Jan Velek, working from the original plans and period photographs, and afterwards the building returned to use as a café.