Futuristic functional folk: impressions of Brno, Czechia

Brno, the capital of Moravia, is Czechia’s second city and was the primary goal of our recent round trip by train. As lovers of beer, architecture, history and folk tradition, we found plenty to enjoy. We arrived from Prague and exited the busy station onto a busy ring road crowded with trams and traffic. As is often the case, the area around a station isn’t where a city chooses to reveal its personality. That came up the hill as we skirted the main square (harvest festival underway, corn dollies and cimbalom bands) on the way to the Hotel Avion – a functionalist, Bauhaus-style building designed by Bohuslav Fuchs in the 1920s. “Those who do not sweat during the harvest will go hungry in winter” was a proverb on display at the harvest festival while “Form follows function” was the slogan of the functionalist architecture movement repeated in various places around Brno. There are more layers, too, of course. When we went for a coffee, we ended up in a minimalist cafe with a scattering…