Alois Mezera was one of the prominent Czech students of the Slovenian architect Josef (Josip) Plečnik. He is primarily known to the public as the architect of the crematorium in Prague-Strašnice, but his designs of numerous school buildings and homes are also notable. From the beginning of the 1920s, he was one of the architects centred around the Styl magazine, which followed the typical style changes in the local architecture of the time. He also gravitated towards classical rendering, which is evident on the example of the Masaryk Jubilee School (Masarykova jubilejní škola) in Jihlava.
Mezera was born in Slaný in 1889. After graduating from the Secondary Technical School (Vyšší průmyslová škola) in Prague in 1910, he continued his studies at the School of Applied Arts in Prague in Plečnik’s studio. When Plečnik was designing the Church of the Most Sacred Heart of Our Lord (Kostel Nejsvětějšího srdce Páně) in Prague’s Vinohrady in the 1920s (1928–1932), he collaborated on the project with his students, including Alois Mezera. Plečnik’s influence is most visible on Mezera’s buildings in his early creative period, but it is also apparent later in his admiration for the classical tradition. Another characteristic feature of the architect’s work consists in his emphasis on detail, and on his inclination to monumentality in public buildings.
At the School of Applied Arts, Mezera met his future wife, the painter Julie Winterová. They got married in 1919, and then travelled throughout Europe together. Their first journey took them to Paris, where Julie Mezerová later exhibited her work. They lived together in Prague’s neighbourhood of Dejvice, which is also indicated by Mezera in the project documentation of his buildings. In the interwar period, he often participated in tenders and designed a large number of public buildings – Czechoslovak embassies, schools, offices, and financial institutions. Many of them were designed in the classical style, with subtle décor on the façade in the national style. However, he abandoned ornamentation after the first half of the 1920s. This is also the case for his school in Jihlava, which has no ornamentation on the façade. When reviewers of the time wrote about him, they used words such as austere, severe, purposeful, modest or even cautious. The crematorium in Strašnice (1926–1931), his most famous and most mature work in terms of style, is rather cold in its appearance and monumental in its simplicity. When Mezera died suddenly in Úpice at the age of 56, the art historian Zdeněk Wirth wrote in his obituary that contemporary Czech architecture had lost the “exquisite distinctive style of an artist with a sober and exacting creative will, calm reasoning and the highest integrity in his choice of artistic technique”.
LCH
