When Wealth Changed the City's Visual Language

Villa Primavesi brings a different kind of power into the route: private wealth, cultural networks and modern design. Built in 1905–1906 for banker Otto Primavesi and his wife Eugenie by Viennese architects Franz von Krauss and Josef Tölk, the villa connected Olomouc to the artistic world of Vienna. Its interiors and decoration involved artists associated with the period, including Anton Hanak, and the Primavesi family had close ties to Gustav Klimt. The building is useful here because it interrupts any simple story in which Olomouc is only bishops and Baroque churches. Around 1900, prosperous patrons could reshape a piece of the old centre with a domestic building that announced modern taste, technology and cosmopolitan ambition rather than ecclesiastical authority.