Josef Karásek

Josef Karásek was born in 1860 in Mnichovo Hradiště, where his father worked as a teacher. After graduating from the Liberec Real Secondary School, he studied at the German University of Technology in Prague. From 1885, he worked at the Moravian Vicegerency in Brno, first as a construction adjunct, and later as chief civil engineer. In the first decade of the twentieth century, he was also a senior lecturer at the Czech Technical University in Brno, and after the establishment of the independent republic, he worked as a councillor in the Ministry of Public Works. As the vicegerency's building councillor, and later as a ministerial councillor, he sat on the panel of several architectural tenders. In 1919, for example, he chaired the tender committee for the construction of houses in Prague's Ořechovka district.

It has not yet been possible to attribute many buildings to him, but it can be assumed that, in addition to the Grammar School in Jihlava and a school in Kroměříž, he also designed other schools and public buildings in the historicist style at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries from his position as employee of the Moravian Vicegerency. He was involved in the construction of many other buildings as a civil engineer, such as the Olomouc Regional (now District) Court. Karásek's most significant building, which he designed together with Theodor Macharáček, is the monumental neoclassical National Institute for the Blind (Zemský ústav slepců) in Brno, which today houses Mendel University.

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