House of Health (Dům zdraví)/Regional Health Centre (Oblastní zdravotní středisko)

The pre-war urban planning concept of Jihlava foreshadowed the continuation of the main two-lane artery of Vrchlického Street with a tree-lined avenue, surrounded by public buildings and schools and connected to the city’s ring road. However, given the changes in the political leadership and its priorities after 1948, this concept was only partially implemented. In the eastern part of the former military complex, the city management soon gave priority to the construction of new apartment blocks in the Sídliště I. housing estate. In 1947, however, the City Council managed to invite tenders for the project of a joint building for the Institute of National Health (Ústav národního zdraví) and the District Health Insurance Company (Okresní nemocenská pojišťovna). Oldřich Liska, an experienced architect from Hradec Králové, succeeded in the tender.

Liska's initial tender design underwent significant changes during the project preparation. It was extended to include some additional parts, in particular the ground floor wing in the east. From 1952, the architect Jaroslav Schovánek, who represented Stavoprojekt in Jihlava from 1949, contributed significantly to the revision and amendment plans. Between 1947 and 1948, work was carried out to prepare the site, and the construction itself drew out until 1954.

The architect designed the building for two departments, which were operationally different but related in function. The outpatient department of the House of National Health (Dům národního zdraví) occupied the left wing, while the medical and administrative department of the District Health Insurance Company (Okresní nemocenská pojišťovna) was located in the middle and in the right wing. In addition to surgeries, consulting rooms, waiting rooms, and offices, the building provided several flats for staff, a common meeting room, a kitchen, and a dining room. For this complex operation, Liska chose the proven monoblock form with a freely developed H-shaped floor plan, with considerably elongated wings and no internal courtyards. He developed the floor plan in the adjoining ground-floor wings with a children's ward and other facilities. He placed two separate main entrances with staircases at the ends of the main frontage, roofed with massive reinforced concrete slabs. Sanitary routes from the sides of the entrances led to the rear car parks. The architect added strip windows with a connected balcony and loggias to the central wing frontage. With interesting structural segmentation of the scratched and coloured plaster, he lightened the otherwise bulky whole. The four-storey main structure of the building was topped with a hipped roof; the side wing of the children's ward, on the other hand, has a flat roof. In one of the many different variants of the project, Liska also proposed a covered outdoor swimming pool, but this did not come to fruition.

In the rear area of the House of Health, a separate Pavilion of Infectious Diseases by the Prague architect Kamil Ossendorf was added between 1960 and 1967 (demolished in 2015). The right wing of the health centre was followed in the 1970s by the addition of a walkway connecting the wing with the new pavilions. The office premises of the original District Health Insurance Company were soon converted into medical surgeries. The upper floor of the original insurance wing used to house a hydrotherapy department, where massages and body wraps were provided, but it disappeared with time.

The Regional Health Centre (Oblastní zdravotní středisko), or the House of Health (Dům zdraví), as the institute is called in Jihlava today, became part of the concept of moving Jihlava's health care to the free north-western suburbs. The outskirts of the city provided a previously undeveloped and sufficiently large space for the development of medical and hospital capacities, as well as cleaner air than that offered by the existing hospital site in the city centre near Legionářů Street. The building style can be classified as the late functionalism of the second half of the 1940s. The elements of this style correspond to the simple and effective floor plan and concept of volume, with emphasis on horizontality, the strip arrangement of windows, loggias raised on subtle columns, glass block walls and ceilings, rounded structural shapes, a predominantly symmetrical composition, and the use of a hipped roof over the main wing. Liska achieved an impressive appearance of this building, which enriched Jihlava with a unique example of remarkable and high-quality architecture of the 1940s.

JL