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Café Esplanade, a fancy coffee shop that was designed by a celebrated modernist architect and frequented by many from Brno’s once-thriving Jewish community.

Brno Architecture Manual

Stop with the “1930s” stuff

A few weeks ago, I was standing on a little triangle of clumpy, unkempt grass between two plastic garbage cans and an electrical transformer on a street corner in Brno, the second-largest city in the Czech Republic.

Before World War II, this little patch of grass was the site of the Café Esplanade, a fancy coffee shop designed by a celebrated modernist architect, where the cream of Brno’s once-thriving Jewish community would go to read the papers, chat, and smoke. Later, they would begin to speak in hushed voices about what was going on next door in Germany and Austria.

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