Moritz Hinträger

Moritz Hinträger was born in the town of Žinkovy in today’s Plzeň region in 1831. He extended his short architectural studies from the Technical University in Prague by graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna under August Sicard von Sicardsburg. In parallel, he worked as a railway civil engineer from 1850 and later became construction director at the Vienna Union-Baugesellschaft. He set up his own business in 1874, at the age of 43. He created the designs for many projects together with another Viennese architect, Heinrich Claus, with whom he also designed the Boys' School in Jana Masaryka Street in Jihlava in 1888–1889. From the early 1880s, he also worked with his son Karl, who had studied architecture at Vienna University of Technology. In 1883, they set up an architectural office together, which focused on the design of public buildings.

Although Moritz Hinträger had specialised in railway buildings at the beginning of his career, the core of his work lay in prestigious public buildings, built mainly in the Neo-Renaissance style. With his co-workers, he designed a number of these buildings over the last four decades of the 19th century, not only for Vienna, but also for many other cities in the Habsburg monarchy. At the beginning, he mainly received commissions by winning architectural tenders, and later by referral. His projects included primarily schools, town halls, banks, as well as hotels and department stores. In Bohemia and Moravia, Moritz Hinträger was particularly active in Šumperk, where he designed a villa, the Seidl Palace (Seidlův palác), and a school. In addition to Jihlava, he also designed other school buildings for Česká Lípa, Nový Jičín, and Svitavy. As designers of school buildings, Hinträger and his colleagues were particularly successful because their designs emphasised good classroom accessibility and smooth operations. Almost without exception, their façades were rendered in the Neo-Renaissance style, which by the standards of the time best reflected the dignity and uniqueness of a building whose mission was to educate. In the 1890s, Hinträger moved from the plastic Italian and French Neo-Renaissance style, inspired by the architecture of his teacher Sicardsburg, to a more decorative style, as seen, for example, in the town hall in Krnov. He died in Bolzano, Italy, aged 78.

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