Otto Adam's villa with house

Otto Adam, a manufacturer, ran a successful knitwear company, Otto Adam & Louis Seidner,in Jihlava with his brother-in-law Louis Seidner, and a factory at Havlíčkova Street 58. He and his wife, Ella, née Pollak, raised five sons. They first turned to the Teplice architect Josef Hühnel for a proposal to convert an existing residential house into a family home. However, despite repeated appeals, they did not obtain a building permit for the project because the house exceeded the designated building line. In 1929, Adam therefore had all the buildings on the plot demolished, and a brand new modern villa was built on the site of the former foundry in the purist style according to the design of the Viennese architect Walter Sobotka.

Sobotka was a graduate of the Technische Hochschule in Vienna, where he had studied under Carl König and Max Fabiani. Vladimír Šlapeta, an architectural historian, places him among the students of the famous Viennese architect Adolf Loos. Sobotka was brought closer to the builder's family by the marriage of his sister Marianne to the brother of Adam's wife, Ella. He designed the Jihlava villa, which is his only known building in our territory, including the interior furnishings and garden layout. He designed it with simple prismatic forms and plastered the façade in a simple white. The flat roofs were topped with terraces featuring simple tubular railings. With his solution of the space on the ground floor of the villa, the architect came very close to Loos' concept of cascading space (“Raumplan”)as we know it for example from the Prague Müller Villa by Adolf Loos and Karel Lhota from 1928–1929: the individual living zones into which the space is divided are of different heights and arranged in steps so that they follow one another in a purposeful and harmonious way and do not interfere with each other.

The centre of Adam's two-storey house consisted of a central hall with a seating area. It was followed by a dining room and a music room with a glass wall, and then by an outdoor terrace facing the garden. The dining room was dominated by a large double-glazed bay window facing the garden,the inner part of which had bevelled edges, while the outer window maintained a rectangular shape. This spatial core of the house was connected to other rooms and service parts of the kitchen and preparation room. On the two floors upstairs were bedrooms, rooms for family members, and guest rooms. Sobotka was also deeply engaged in residential design and for the interior furnishings of the house he chose pieces from Jihlava suppliers, as well as products from the renowned Thonet brand and luminaires by Lobmeyr. The tasteful furnishings were complemented by furniture made of mahogany, Macassar ebony, cherry, and walnut wood. After the completion of the villa, an article about it was published in the Moderne Bauformenmagazine.

Soon after the completion of the villa, a house with a flat for the caretaker and a garage began to be built according to Sobotka's next design. It was located at Vrchlického 10, in the corner of the garden, following the existing row of houses on Vrchlického Street. The Adam family rented the house out. The building was also characterised by a simple cuboid structure with a smooth façade and simply formed shutters. However, it was given a hipped roof to preserve the integrity of the house block. Both Adam's buildings, the villa and the house for rent, were built by the Jihlava builder and engineer Konrad Weigner. Otto Adam died in 1934. Adam's family owned the villa and the house until 1939. During the Protectorate, the Gestapo and the SS intelligence service were based there. The family were persecuted by the Nazis. The older sons, Valter and Helmut, were executed in Brno in 1941; Adam’s wife, Ella, and younger son Herbert survived their imprisonment in concentration camps, and after the war, they emigrated to the Federal Republic of Germany, while his son Gottfried left for Canada. After 1945, the villa became a State Security office, and from the 1960s, a nursery of the company Motorpal. During subsequent renovations, Sobotka's original spatial concept, the uniquely designed window openings, the purist character of the façade, and the high-end interior furnishings disappeared. Likewise, the existing window panes no longer correspond with the original appearance of what is probably the most important purist building in Jihlava. House no. 12 with part of the original garden is owned by the Czech Social Democratic Party. The house next door at no. 10 has been used continuously for residential purposes.

JL