| Jan Letzel |
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| CATEGORIES ABOUT JAN LETZEL | |
| 1880 births | |
| letzel, jan | |
| 1925 deaths | |
| czech architects | |
| modernist architects | |
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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 ( Hiroshima Peace Memorial ) because the first atomic bomb flattened every building in the city centre except this one. Twenty years later it would become a landmark for the whole of humanity. 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
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