Zdeněk Petrů

Zdeněk Petrů was born in Brno in 1934 into a family of merchants. His mother, née Špačková, came from Brno and his father was from Wallachia. Together, they ran a convenience store in Brno. After graduating from the Brno Real Grammar School, Petrů wanted to continue his studies in philosophy, but was not accepted. Instead, in 1952, he began to study architecture at the Technical University in Brno, in Professor Bedřich Rozehnal’s studio. After successfully completing his studies in 1958, he was assigned a job in Stavoprojekt in Jihlava, which operated as a branch of the Brno company. Within Stavoprojekt, Petrů worked in the architecture studio under Jan Řídký until 1975, with a short break between 1968 and 1969 when he was employed with the Jihlava City Hall in the construction department. Later, he also ran his own design group under the architecture studio.

The architect's most important buildings designed for Jihlava and the surrounding towns such as Humpolec, Kamenice nad Lipou, Třebíč, Velké Meziříčí, Větrný Jeníkov, and Žďár nad Sázavou, come from his time at Stavoprojekt. The Sídliště III. U Hřbitova housing estate in Jihlava is considered his most significant and at the same time most extensive project where he led as main designer. For the large urban complex with ten terraced prefab concrete buildings, Petrů designed a nursery and the Krystal department store and restaurant, which were very successful from an architectural point of view.

Petrů mainly designed housing estates with residential prefab concrete buildings, and nursery and primary school buildings. It is evident from his projects that he tended towards the functionalist expression of the interwar years in his work with material, which he had to adapt to the requirements of the communist establishment of the time. Examples of his projects include the school in Větrný Jeníkov and the Krystal department store in the Jihlava housing estate, where the originally designed strip windows and glazed shopfronts were replaced with a series of divided single or double-hung windows in the final implementation. A telling example of the architect's fondness for the legacy of functionalism was undoubtedly the Lung Pavilion for the hospital in Uherské Hradiště, where he collaborated with Marta Přibová. There, the design duo openly declared their support for the functionalist hospital buildings designed by Bedřich Rozehnal.

In 1975, Petrů returned to his native Brno with his family. He first worked at the State Project Institute of Trade (Státní projektový ústav obchodu, SPÚO), and later at the Cooperative of Building Structures (DRUPOS, Družstvo pozemních staveb), where he mainly designed standard houses for families. In the nineties, before his retirement, he worked briefly in the technical department of the Bohunice Hospital in Brno, where he was involved in minor building modifications.

LVo