Pardubice crematorium
The Pardubice Crematorium is a cremation facility in the Czech city of Pardubice . The Rondo-Cubist building was built according to plans by the architect Pavel Janák and is a national cultural monument .
location
The crematorium is located south of the city center in the Green Suburb in the main cemetery on Pod Břízkami Street.
history
After a request from the Pardubice city council for permission to create a possibility of cremation had been rejected due to the legal situation in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, efforts were resumed when at the beginning of the First World War in the city the construction of a military hospital and a house for the disabled took place. While the city council demanded the cremation of the deceased soldiers for hygienic reasons, the army built a new military cemetery.
After the Pardubice city council decided to build a crematorium in the spring of 1918, an architecture competition was announced. The specifications for this were a 140 m² ballroom with a choir for the organ and the singers as well as a niche for a Christian altar , rooms for the orator and for the bereaved, an oven hall with cremation ovens, a fuel store, a cremator apartment, five to six death chambers, one Coroner and a public lavatory. In March 1919, a jury evaluated the 95 projects submitted by 81 authors. A first prize was not awarded and none of the proposals were recommended for physical execution. Pavel Janák's project received second place with some reservations, while third prize went to Bedřich Feuerstein, Otakar Polák and Vladimír Škára. On April 1, 1919, the National Assembly of the newly formed Czechoslovakia passed Law 180/1919 Sb., Which allowed cremation.
The financing of the project remained open. The originally planned construction by 1921 from donations from the supporters of cremation turned out to be impossible. The joint stock company, founded on the proposal of the architect Bohumil Korbel with a third stake of the city, lost its legal basis with the amendment of the Funeral Act 464/1921 Sb., The construction of crematoria was reserved exclusively for the political communities. After Pavel Janák presented the revised plans, the city council decided on July 14, 1922 to take over the crematorium shares as municipal bonds and to build the crematorium on the former military cemetery. The construction was carried out from August 1922 by the Pardubice construction company Karel Kohout & Jaroslav Krupař. The ovens, carts and submersible platform made by the Swiss manufacturer Rothenbach, Bern, were supplied by the Prague brothers Kohout.
Because of the financial difficulties, savings were made on the interior. In the celebration hall, for example, only a painting was applied instead of the intended wooden box ceiling. The rose window with a diameter of three meters in the north wall above the choir was designed by František Kysela, who also designed the decoration of the 8.5 m high hall, on the intervention of the designer. The construction was completed in September 1923 and the cost was CZK 1.9 million. The first cremation took place in 1923. The organ was installed in 1926, until then the choir was used as a gallery for the mourners.
In 1995 a new building for the cremation facilities was erected south of the crematorium. In 1998 the city transferred the building to the municipal service company Služby města Pardubic as. Between 2004 and 2009, the building was gradually reconstructed, including the general renovation of the facade.
In 1958 the crematorium was included in the register of immovable cultural assets, and since 2010 it has been a national cultural monument.
Trivia
In 1968 the crematorium was the location of Juraj Herz's film The Incinerator ( Spalovač mrtvol ) .
Web links
Coordinates: 50 ° 1 ′ 10 ″ N , 15 ° 46 ′ 36.9 ″ E