Jan Letzel

Jan Letzel (April 9, 1880 – December 26, 1925) was a Czech architect.

Jan Letzel was born in the town of Náchod, Bohemia. The son of a hotel owner, he studied at Prague's School of Creative and Industrial Art under Jan Kotěra, the founder of modern architecture in Czechoslovakia. Letzel graduated in 1904, and in 1907, after a stint in Egypt, he came to Japan, finding work as a designer in Tokyo.

During his ten years in Japan, Letzel created more than 15 residences and public buildings. Hiroshima's Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, a fusion of neo-Baroque and Art Deco, was completed in 1916. Hiroshima at that time was dominated by two-storey wooden buildings, and the Promotional Hall, with its bold European design and unique copper-plated dome, soon became one of Hiroshima's most striking landmarks. It gained further notoriety after surviving the atomic attack on the city in 1945, to be rededicated, still as a ruin, as the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, otherwise known as the "A-Bomb Dome".

Letzel himself never lived to see the transformation of his Industrial Promotion Hall into the A-Bomb Dome. The architect left Japan in 1923 in the wake of the Great Kantō earthquake, and returned home to Czechoslovakia. Suffering from ill health, he died at the age of 45.

External links

* [http://www.radio.cz/en/issue/69210 A look at the Czech architect who built Hiroshima's Industrial Promotion Hall — today's A-Bomb Dome]
* [http://www.jmc.cz/stan/letzel/english.htm 2000, Letzel Year]