Good Architecture kommt aus Pilsen: Professors and Students of the German Industrial School in Pilsen, 1876–1928

The exhibition commemorates the 150th anniversary of the founding of the German State Industrial School in Pilsen, one of the most important technical schools in the Czech lands alongside those in Prague and Liberec. Since its founding in the 1870s, despite complex ethnic relations, it developed into a respected institution that contributed significantly to the development of technical education. Its professors and graduates participated in a number of construction projects in western, southern, and northern Bohemia.

The school reached the peak of its development in the first decade of the 20th century, when architects August Helmar Tetmajer and Ludwig Tremmel secured contracts related to the expansion of the Škoda Works and the coal industry. Ten years after the founding of Czechoslovakia, the architecture program—which had German as its language of instruction—was relocated to Děčín. 

Notable graduates included, for example, the architect responsible for the completion of St. Vitus Cathedral, Kamil Hilbert, Ladislav Šaloun’s collaborator on the Hus Monument, Antonín Pfeiffer, František Krásný, architect of the Sokol building and designer of the Tyrš House, and above all Jan Kotěra, whose teaching influenced subsequent generations of Czech architects. 

The exhibition will feature originals and reproductions of plans, photographs, and documents; a newly created model of the German lyceum on Resslova Street in Pilsen; period publications; and unique historical models from the collections of today’s Secondary Industrial School of Construction in Pilsen.

The exhibition and accompanying publication are the result of the work of the Research Center for 19th- and 20th-Century Architecture at the West Bohemian Gallery in Pilsen.