Březinky housing estate, shopping and service centre (Středisko obchodu a služeb), and health centre

The vast eastern area of the city had already been marked out for future development in the interwar regulatory plan by the Brno architect Bohuslav Fuchs. However, instead of the garden city proposed by Fuchs, prefab concrete buildings with approximately 3,300 flats for 13,000 inhabitants were built there from the late 1960s. The overall zoning plan of the complex was prepared by the architect Zdeněk Gryc from Jan Řídký’s Stavoprojekt studio Jihlava in 1967. The original plan envisaged the construction of single-family houses in the vicinity of what is now Demlova Street and a much lower density of buildings and number of flats in general. The area was delimited by the existing estate of houses and the cemetery at Kalvárie from the north-east, by the deep valley of the Jihlávka River east of the city centre, by the road to Brno from the south, and by the large plots of land owned by the municipal construction company from the south-west. During the successive phases of construction, the housing estate ‏ covered an area of over 80 hectares. Thanks to the initiative of Zdeněk Gryc and the historian František Hoffmann from the Jihlava Museum, the complex was named Březinovy sady at the beginning, but it was soon renamed A. Zápotockého housing estate. Today, it is known as Březinova or Březinky.

Vladimír Veselý from the Brno University of Technology collaborated on the transport solution. Between 1968 and 1973, preparatory work was carried out on the main perimeter road, now Okružní Street, which formed the artery of the entire new district from the south in the form of a large ring road to the west and at the same time closed the ring road around the inner city to the necessary extent. From Okružní Street, dead-end streets branched off into other parts. The architect's main intention was to force car traffic out of the main social centres of the complex as much as possible and to create an undisturbed main pedestrian route surrounded by greenery across the whole estate, with underpasses and footbridges to avoid meeting any traffic. As Gryc recollects, the design of the estate was born with the vision that was prevalent in English urban planning:"pedestrians first". The central route connected the primary school grounds with the adjacent nursery on the eastern side of the estate. A trolleybus turning area was built near the centre, close to the shopping centre and health centre. The central pedestrian route led up to the Heulos Forest Park. It was to continue there with a footbridge about five metres wide and more than two hundred metres long over the Jihlávka River valley and smoothly connect to the historic centre of Jihlava, ending near Svobody Square. However, the implementation of the ambitious footbridge plan was derailed by the political changes after 1968. Unfortunately, the second underpass, which was supposed to be located at the intersection of what are now Březinova and Okružní Streets at the Lidl supermarket, was not built either.

The construction of the housing estate was divided into several stages between 1970 and 1987. Phase zero in 1968 involved the demolition of about five small buildings. In the first phase, the high-rise five-storey buildings and social amenities – the nursery and shopping centre – were constructed in the south-east corner near Demlova, Okružní, and Březinova Streets. The first block of flats was opened in 1971. In the second phase, the terraced development progressed to the north-west along the contour lines on a gentle slope. The houses there are lower and have unconventionally positioned garages on the ground floor, with grey-blue mosaic tiling between the windows distinguishing them from each other. At the same time, the primary school complex with a canteen and an outdoor sports field was built on the eastern edge of the housing estate, designed by the architect Ctibor Seliga. The third phase in the early 1980s added the shopping centre and health centre. A 550-seat cinema was planned to be built next to the Okružní Road in the eastern part of the estate. However, the rectangular cinema building with a circular auditorium was ultimately not built. Between 1979 and 1981, it was replaced with two high-rise prefab concrete buildings and the recently partially demolished Jihlava Hotel by the architect Zdeněk Baueršíma. Fan-shaped rows of slab buildings together with high-rise five-storey buildings filled the north-western area of the housing estate in the fourth phase. In the final fifth phase, a group of sixteen separate eight-storey buildings was added on Na Kopci Street on the edge of the Heulos Forest Park. For the majority of the blocks of flats, the T 06 B modular prefabricated panel system was used. It was supplied by the Jihlava company Prefa and was already fitted with window panels and the characteristic grey-blue or brick-red mosaic between the windows. The only exception was a pair of high-rise eleven-storey buildings in the northern part of Okružní Street designed by the architect Pavel Fousek in 1978.

The Vysočinashopping and service centre by the architect Zdeněk Gryc consisted of two parallel shop wings and side corridors with staircases leading to the upper floor gallery. The gallery formed a continuous arcade for a comfortable covered passage on the ground floor. The four-sided layout enclosed a small rectangular square. The shopping and service centre was located in the middle of the housing estate. It was connected to the main thoroughfare on the sunken ground floor, reserved for deliveries. The architect failed to gain approval for the original design of the shopping centre with an underground car park with the building contractor, the Construction Company Brno (Pozemní staveby Brno), as they were only able to work with a prefabricated skeleton of 6 × 6 metres, unsuitable for the construction of a shopping centre. On the second floor, Gryc's shopping centre was connected to the main pedestrian route leading from the primary schools by a footbridge. Another footbridge with a stairway led to the service car park. The centre consisted of a north wing with a chemist’s, a fruit and vegetable shop, a grocery shop, a patisserie, a hairdresser’s, a restaurant, a pub, a library, and a nursery. The south wing housed the post office, a telephone exchange, and other shops. The square between the two wings was decorated with works of art, a minimalist fountain made of granite blocks, and a granite sculpture named Mother and Childby Roman Podrázský, with the blue shades of the glass mosaic tiles on the rounded pillars of the colonnade matching them.

Gryc's shopping centre won several awards in regional architectural exhibitions. The Symposium on Social Amenities Centres held in Prague in 1988 praised it as the only implementation of a complete square in a housing estate in the Czech Republic. The whole shopping centre and health centre complex, completed in 1988, gave the impression of being airy and sophisticated, while fulfilling its various functions really well. During the post-revolutionary privatisation, it came into private ownership, and as a result of gradual structural changes, it unfortunately lost much of the charm of its original architectural concept.

The gradually completed social amenities have largely ensured the self-sufficiency of the Březinky housing estate and its independence from the services provided by the rest of the town. This created a new counterpoint to the old centre – a city within a city – for more than ten thousand inhabitants. The housing estate included two standardised nurseries, and an atypical nursery building by the architect Marta Příbová, which was added on Stavbařů Street (no. 4334) in 1985. In the last stage of the construction between 1982 and 1989, a sports hall with a gymnasium for 200 spectators, a fitness centre, and a sauna (no. 4628) by the architect Jana Fousková was built right above the Jihlávka River.

The abundance of greenery, high-quality landscaping, and good service in relation to the sensitively balanced density and height levels of the buildings place Březinky among the examples of sophisticated housing estates in the Czech Republic. Architectural historians compare it to the Lesná housing estate in Brno. According to Zdeněk Gryc himself, the successful solution of this Jihlava housing estate is down to the political relaxation just before 1968. Gryc's sophisticated urban concept of quiet and healthy living in a park without traffic disturbance will hopefully continue to live on.

JL