Enoch Kern's Son (Enocha Kerna syn), mechanical weaving mill

This versatile type of production building, which is still in use today – a hall with a flat roof opened by a pyramid skylight – has its origins in the weaving mill buildings designed in the 1890s by the Swiss industrial architect Carl Arnold Séquin-Bronner. Unlike the older halls with saw-tooth roofs, the building could be oriented in any direction, did not suffer as much from snow and was more economical due to the smaller built-up area. Originally, these buildings consisted of wooden-cement roofs on cast-iron columns, but in 1898, Eduard Ast's company started to build them as reinforced concrete frame structures. The first major projects in the Czech lands date back to 1902 – a pair of railway workshop buildings on Svárovská Street in Česká Lípa, a weaving mill at no. 117 in Dolní Chrastava, and a building of the same purpose in Liberec, which is no longer in existence today. The industrial architect Bruno Bauer (1880–1938) improved this construction even further for Theodor Kern (1858–1919): the longitudinal girders, 4.7 metres long, are supported by pairs of beams and the co-acting walls of the transverse skylights, allowing a transverse span of 7.6 metres. The construction was carried out by the Brno branch of the Viennese construction company of Eduard Ast and provided space for one hundred looms equipped with a direct electric drive – another solution that ranked it among the most advanced constructions of its time. Karel Sedláček (1891–1927) purchased the building from the bankruptcy assets of Kern's company and started to produce car bodies and bus towing vehicles there. After nationalisation, the workshop became part of the national enterprise Karosa in Vysoké Mýto, which renovated the building after 1952. During the renovation, the external division of the perimeter walls, originally made of fired bricks, disappeared completely. The Jihlava spin-off plant specialised in truck bodies and also built food vans. Today, the reinforced concrete hall is used for engineering production.

LB