Jan Letzel

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Jan Letzel in a kimono

Jan Letzel (born April 9, 1880 in Náchod , Bohemia , † December 26, 1925 in Prague , Czechoslovakia ) was a Czech architect .

Life

Industrial Goods Exhibition Hall in Hiroshima

His parents were the eponymous hotelier Jan Letzel and his wife Walburga, b. Havlíčková. After completing his training in the construction department of the higher trade school, he took the position of assistant in the construction department of the state trade school in Pardubitz in 1899 . In 1901 he received a scholarship to study architecture at the Prague School of Applied Arts , where he was a student of Jan Kotěra , the founder of modern Czech architecture, for three years . In 1902 and 1903 he went on study trips through Bohemia, Dalmatia , Montenegro and Herzegovina .

From June 1904 to August 1905 Jan Letzel was employed by Quido Bělský's architectural office in Prague. At the same time he carried out an independent contract in Mšené-lázně ( Mscheno ), where a spa building and an Art Nouveau pavilion were built according to his design .

In October 1905, through the mediation of his teacher Jan Kotěra, he got a job in the architecture chancellery of the Egyptian governor in Cairo , where the court architect Fabrizius Pasha became his boss. In the spring of 1907 he returned to Prague after visiting Rome, Milan, Venice and other Italian cities on the return journey.

Letzel's next travel destination was Japan. After a short stay in Prague and Nachod, he reached Tokyo in June 1907 , where he initially worked for a French architecture firm.

Together with his friend Karel Hora, Letzel set up an architecture office in Tokyo in 1910. In the next few years he designed over 40 buildings, including the French school Sacre Coeur, the Jesuit college, the German embassy, ​​several hotels and administrative buildings.

His most famous design was the exhibition hall for industrial goods in Hiroshima , which was completed in 1915 and almost completely destroyed on August 6, 1945 by the American atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima . The dome, preserved as a steel frame, is intended as a memorial, known as the atomic bomb dome , to commemorate the horrors of nuclear war.

When his partner Karel Hora returned to Bohemia in 1913, Letzel continued to run the architecture company on his own, but had to give it up in 1915 due to the war. After Czechoslovakia was founded as an independent state in 1918 , Letzel received the post of commercial attaché at the Czechoslovak embassy in Tokyo in 1919 . In March 1920 he returned to his homeland and a few months later gave up the post of commercial attaché.

In November 1922, Letzel traveled again to Japan and had to experience how many of his buildings were destroyed in the devastating earthquake of September 1, 1923 . Deeply disappointed, he returned to Prague at the end of November that year, where he died two years later at the age of only 45.

The asteroid (6266) Letzel was named after him.

literature

  • Stanislav Bohadlo: Korespondence architekta Jana Letzela z Egypta 1905–1906 . in: Stopami Dějin Náchodska, Nachod 2000, ISBN 80-902158-7-4 , pp. 257-296

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Naming of the asteroid (6266) Letzel (English)
personal data
SURNAME Letzel, Jan
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Czech architect
DATE OF BIRTH April 9, 1880
PLACE OF BIRTH Náchod , Bohemia
DATE OF DEATH December 26, 1925
Place of death Prague