Palace of Justice (Justiční palác)

The building housing what is now the College of Polytechnics (Vysoká škola polytechnická Jihlava) was not originally built for educational purposes. The large building, located in the block delimited by Tolstého Street, Tyršova Street, Jiráskova Street, and the bus station, was built between 1904 and 1906 as a Palace of Justice (Justiční palác). Its monumental historicist façades reference the building’s original mission – the distinctive bossage, applied not only on the ground floor but also on the giant order pilasters, is meant to represent the strength of the office and is typical of court buildings. The bossage motif is repeated in the window frames and the windows are additionally decorated with distinctive pediments on the first floor. Very similar Neo-Baroque government buildings were built at the same time in Vienna, where the architect of the palace also came from.

In the 1880, a site had been identified for the location of the new majestic building when the city's regulatory plan was being drawn up. The plan envisaged the construction of impressive buildings in the Špitálské suburb, located between the train station and the historic centre of Jihlava. The first designs of the palace date back to 1895, but they were revised at the beginning of the new century. The project which was eventually used is attributed to engineer Franz Geilhofer (formerly misnamed Friedrich), an employee of the construction department of the Ministry of the Interior in Vienna. The plans for the Palace of Justice (Justiční palác), signed by him, have been preserved in the Jihlava district archive. He designed the palace in a truly magnificent way – the pentagonal floor plan forms a large courtyard into which an additional section is inserted axially.

The construction, which commenced in the spring of 1904, was carried out under the occasional supervision of Franz Geilhofer and Gustav Schütz by a construction consortium consisting of the Jihlava builders Karl Wagner, Ignaz Lang, and Josef Kubička. The building was officially approved for use in September 1906 and was subsequently the Regional Court and the Public Prosecutor's Office, as well as the Revenue Office and the Cadastral Office. In the north wing of the building, there was a prison that could hold over 200 prisoners.

The building also served as the seat of the judiciary and other authorities during the First Republic. During the Second World War, the Gestapo had offices in part of the building. At the beginning of the 1940s, several modifications to the building were carried out. After the war, along with the judicial authorities, the building housed the regional headquarters of the National Security (Národní bezpečnost), though this was only until 1960. After that, the building was granted to the university (originally to the Pedagogical Institute, later to the University of Agriculture in Brno), which involved structural changes in the 1960s. A more significant intervention was the courtyard extension, where new classrooms and workshops were built. Over the years, a number of different schools and faculties have come and gone. Since 2004, it has been the home of the College of Polytechnics Jihlava (Vysoká škola polytechnická Jihlava). The former Palace of Justice building provided the school with rooms suitable as classrooms and studies, but for a long time the layout of the building lacked a large lecture hall. Therefore, in 2016, the architects from Qarta Architektura, Jiří Řezák, David Wittassek, Pavel Fanta, and Lukáš Němeček, designed a new learning centre extension.

The main part of the project included the construction of a new lecture hall for more than three hundred students on a triangular floor plan with rounded corners. To the north, the lecture hall is adjacent to the historic building. On the exposed concrete façade, the architects hung a white metal sunshade, giving the building character. Exposed concrete was also widely used in the interior. Moreover, the architects renovated the former prison wing, which connected to the lecture hall, and added a lift in the courtyard. The lath construction of the façades on the extensions in the courtyard immediately distinguish them from the old Neo-Baroque building.

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