Grain warehouse of the German Warehouse and Agricultural Cooperative (Německé skladištní a hospodářské družstvo) for Štoky and Jihlava

   
Mechanised grain warehouses are still the unmissable and almost ubiquitous proof of the development and high organisation of self-reliant agricultural cooperatives and the high level of agricultural construction. The Jihlava warehouse for 150 wagons of grain was ceremonially handed over to the members of the cooperative at the beginning of 1928. It was constructed by the Brno construction company of engineer Johann Theimer (1872–1941) according to a design created by his son, the architect Alfred Theimer (1896–?), a member of the professional Association of German Architects (B. D. A.), probably trained in Munich. Alfred Theimer introduced the morphology of German reform architecturein the design of grain warehouses in the Czech lands. For a long time, he cooperated with the Brno headquarters of the Association of German Agricultural Associations (Sdružení německých zemědělských svazů). In 1925, he designed a warehouse in Dobronín for the Jihlava cooperative, and a similar one for the Silesian Agricultural Cooperative in Opava. A smaller, four-storey version of the Jihlava project was used in 1928 by members of the German Warehouse Cooperative (Německé skladištní družstvo) for Uničov and its surroundings. Later, from 1935–1936, Alfred Theimer created a series of typified grain warehouses, which the cooperatives built as shareholders of the Czechoslovak Grain Company (Československá obilní společnost).

The 22-metre-high building consists of a five-storey main building with two wings with a reinforced concrete skeleton with six bays, supporting beam ceilings of grain lofts, divided into individual chambers by movable wooden partitions. On the south side, it runs into the roof over the ramp at the railway siding. The hall space of the sixth floor, which covers an area of 12 × 24 metres, is made up of a seven-metre-high “lamellar” truss, a then rediscovered construction made of short, pressure-stressed battens bolted into the curved surface of the vault. From 1906, it was developed by Friedrich Zollinger (1880–1945), building councillor in Merseburg, Saxony-Anhalt, for urban social development. However, it was also widely used in industrial and agricultural buildings – the most famous is probably the barn belonging to a farmhouse in Garkau, Holstein, designed by the architect Hugo Häring in 1924–1925. In Jihlava, it was designed and constructed by the specialised Prague office of engineer Viktor Zollinger, holder of the Zollinger patent for Czechoslovakia, and it is also used on the eastern attached building with the cooperative offices and flats for the caretaker and staff working in the warehouse – which only required a three-man operation thanks to the advanced mechanisation. The original equipment was designed and supplied by the Dresden branch of Mayer & Co. (Mayer & spol.), a factory from Kalk near Cologne producing pots and perforated sheet metal, but it was largely replaced in 1960 for the Regional Purchasing Company, n. p. Jihlava (Krajský výkupní podnik, n. p. Jihlava). However, the building has been preserved in a completely authentic way.

LB
Literature and other sources 

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