Janáček Theatre () is an

opera house An opera house is a theater building used for performances of opera. Like many theaters, it usually includes a stage, an orchestra pit, audience seating, backstage facilities for costumes and building sets, as well as offices for the institut ...

in the city of

Brno Brno ( , ; ) is a Statutory city (Czech Republic), city in the South Moravian Region of the Czech Republic. Located at the confluence of the Svitava (river), Svitava and Svratka (river), Svratka rivers, Brno has about 403,000 inhabitants, making ...

Czech Republic The Czech Republic, also known as Czechia, and historically known as Bohemia, is a landlocked country in Central Europe. The country is bordered by Austria to the south, Germany to the west, Poland to the northeast, and Slovakia to the south ...

. It is the largest of the three theatres serving the National Theatre Brno ("NdB") opera and ballet company, the others being the Mahen and the Reduta. It was built starting in 1960 after decades of delay and finally opened in October 1965, since when it has premiered some twenty operas and ballets. A major renovation was completed in 2018. The building's façade is north-facing, away from the city center and towards the nearby house of its namesake composer, who is grandly memorialized on the adjacent landscaped green.

History

The building of Janáček Theatre, the youngest of the buildings of National Theatre in Brno, was planned from the early 20th century. From 1910 to 1957, seven

architectural competition An architectural competition is a type of design competition, in which an entity that intends to build new work, or is just seeking ideas, invites architects to submit design proposals. The winning scheme is usually chosen by an independent panel ...

s were held to find the best design and project of the building. Around 150 architects participated in the competitions, among them several notable exponents of Czech arts and architecture:

Bohuslav Fuchs Bohuslav Fuchs (24 March 1895 – 18 September 1972) was a Czechs, Czech modernist architect. He also worked as a university teacher and urban planner. He is considered one of the most important Czech architects of the 20th century. His work is pr ...

, Josef Gočár,

Vlastislav Hofman Vlastislav Hofman (6 February 1884 – 28 August 1964) was an artist and architect who lived and worked first in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and later in Czechoslovakia. Though he was a painter, set designer, graphic artist, furniture designe ...

, Josef Chochol, Pavel Janák,

Jan Kotěra Jan Kotěra (18 December 1871 – 17 April 1923) was a Czech architect, artist and interior designer, and one of the key figures of modern architecture in Bohemia. Biography Kotěra was born in Brno, the largest city in Moravia, to a Czech fath ...

and others. The proposed designs span a wide range of architectural styles documenting the history and development of the Czech architecture in the first half of the 20th century. The styles include

historicism Historicism is an approach to explaining the existence of phenomena, especially social and cultural practices (including ideas and beliefs), by studying the process or history by which they came about. The term is widely used in philosophy, ant ...

Art Nouveau Art Nouveau ( ; ; ), Jugendstil and Sezessionstil in German, is an international style of art, architecture, and applied art, especially the decorative arts. It was often inspired by natural forms such as the sinuous curves of plants and ...

Cubism Cubism is an early-20th-century avant-garde art movement which began in Paris. It revolutionized painting and the visual arts, and sparked artistic innovations in music, ballet, literature, and architecture. Cubist subjects are analyzed, broke ...

modernism Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction, and Subjectivity and objectivity (philosophy), subjective experience. Philosophy, politics, architecture, and soc ...

, Functionalism, Socialist realism, and classicising

Neofunctionalism Neofunctionalism is a theory of regional integration which downplays globalisation and reintroduces territory into its governance. Neofunctionalism is often regarded as the first European integration theory developed by Ernst B. Haas in 1958 a ...

References

Theatres in Brno Opera houses in the Czech Republic Theatres completed in 1965 Music venues completed in 1965 {{Europe-theat-struct-stub