One of the first sites our tour guide showed us during my initial research trip to Brno in 2013, was the historic Brno Exhibition Center. It made an impression on me.
Inaugurated in 1928, the Brno Exhibition Center reflected the economic expansion of the post World War I era. It is also modernism on a large scale—a sprawling collection of geometrically-shaped buildings and glass-enclosed pavilions from the interwar period and beyond, gathered along two wide boulevards in a large flat plain southwest of the city proper. Hundreds of thousands of visitors a year still attend its events, including trade fairs, conferences, seminars, concerts, and art exhibits.
10th Anniversary
What strikes me most about the Brno Exhibition Center is its association with the first democratic government of Czechoslovakia. Its opening in 1928 was designed to coincide with the 10-year anniversary of the creation of Czechoslovakia at the end of World War I. The Brno Exhibition Center was a symbol of the new country's dynamism, and helped put Brno on the map as a European leader in modernist architecture and technological advances.
The success of the Brno Exhibition Center helped inspire architects and engineers responsible for the hundreds of modernist buildings from the late 1920s through the 1930s that still stand in Brno. The most famous of these is the Villa Tugendhat built in 1929-30 and designed by Mies van der Rohe. My grandparents' 1937 apartment house, attributed to Otto Eisler, is also from that era.
Dad's Memories
My father, born in Brno in 1920, made a brief and rather dry reference to the Brno Exhibition Center in his 1990 memoir. "I remember seeing a quite modern exhibition ground,” he wrote, “which was near our summer house located on the outskirts of the town on Žlutý kopec (Yellow Hill). I am told that after the war… the exhibition ground was added to, much enlarged."
The interesting thing is not what he remembered about the "exhibition ground," as he put it, but that he remembered it at all. He penned his memoir long after he left Czechoslovakia at age 18. He finally went back at age 76, to view his parents' properties that he had reclaimed after democracy was restored to the country in the 1990s. He had avoided returning before then because of painful memories: the antisemitism he experienced as a child in Brno, and the tragic fates of his relatives who remained in Czechoslovakia during the war and were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators. Not did he want to return during the forty years of oppression the country endured after the war under communism.
So why would the Brno Exhibition Center make a lifelong impression on a man with such a history? He provides one of the answers: he saw it regularly on his way to and from his parents' nearby summer house. But he also must have absorbed the local and national pride in this project. According to the Brno Architectural Manual, the first exhibition in 1928, The Exhibition of Contemporary Culture, was attended by 2.7 million visitors, and "the entire nation's gaze was fixed on Brno."
After immigrating to the U.S. in 1940, my father became a mechanical engineer and eventually helped design our flat-roofed, redwood and glass home on a hillside in California. Whether consciously or unconsciously, his exposure to Brno’s architecture and engineering achievements, as manifested in part by the Brno Exhibition Center, would influence his professional and aesthetic choices throughout his life.
100th Anniversary
In 2018, during the nation-wide celebration of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Czechoslovakia, I saw an exhibit at the Brno Exhibition Center of the great Czech painter, Alfons Mucha. The exhibition included nine of the artist’s works from his ‘Slav Epic,’ a series of large canvases that depicts the history of the Slavic people. The work was conceived in 1899 and completed in 1926. It was offered as a gift to the country in 1928, the year that the Brno Exhibition Center opened, in honor of the 10-year anniversary celebration of the country’s independence as a democratic state.
I was glad to be in the Czech Republic during that year, knowing that my father’s early life was shaped by living in a democracy that allowed his enterprising parents to follow their dreams—for a while anyway. His life-long love of architecture, design, and technology stemmed from his Czech childhood in Brno. He left Brno in 1938, as a terrible second world war was approaching that would fracture his world. Now, my country, the United States, is dangerously close to losing its democracy through efforts by those who would interfere with free and fair elections. Anything that celebrates freedom and democracy, like the Brno Exhibition Center, has my vote.
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