František Krásný

Architect František Krásný, once labelled the pioneer of Art Nouveau in the Czech lands, was born in Koterov near Plzeň. He acquired his architectural education in Vienna under the tutelage of the celebrated architect Otto Wagner. He subsequently continued to hone his skills in the city’s leading architectural studios. He continued to work in the Austro-Hungarian capital up until 1920. By that time he had begun to design buildings in Prague, Brno and Plzeň, as well as for the Czech enclave in Vienna e.g. the local Sokol building.

It was in connection with this nationalist-minded gymnastics society in Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia that he earned the nickname the “Sokol court architect”. He designed a total of 150 Sokol halls and so de facto created the prototype Sokol building.

In Krásný’s early work we find traces of historicism and Renaissance Revival. Gradually, however, he gives himself over completely to Art Nouveau. His tenement buildings and especially this villa, designed for Karel Kestřánek in Plzeň, are – alongside the architectural commissions of Friedrich Ohmann and Osvald Polívka – among the first ever Art Nouveau buildings in the Czech lands.

During the 1920s, František Krásný managed to rid his work of the overly decorative elements emanating from historical inspiration. In his published work, he instead champions decoration that is simple and serves purely tectonic ends. Though rather conservative by inclination, František Krásný nonetheless belonged to a generation of architects who, by virtue of age and opinion, preceded younger, more radical artists marching under the banner of functionalism.

František Krásný died on 14 June, 1947 in Mariánské Lázně shortly before reaching his eighty-second birthday. Residents in the town of his birth have not forgotten him: since the beginning of 2015, the citizens of Koterov have been preparing a “Commemorative Site to mark František Krásný and the Koterov Sokol” on the premises of the local Sokol hall, also known as the Malý Tyršův dům, the architect of which was none other than František Krásný.