Jan Karel Zdenko Kotěra (18th December 1871 Brno - 17th April 1923 Prague) was a Czech architect, urban designer, architect, furniture designer and painter. Kotěra was born in Brno, the largest city in Moravia, to a Czech father and German-speaking mother. He studied architecture in Vienna during the waning days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire under the Viennese master Otto Wagner. Kotěra returned to Prague in 1897 to help found a dynamic movement of Czech nationalist artists and architects centered on the Mánes Union of Fine Arts. Strongly influenced by the work of the Vienna Secession, his work bridged late nineteenth-century architectural design and early modernism. Kotěra collaborated with Czech sculptors Jan Štursa, Stanislav Sucharda, and Stanislav’s son Vojtěch Sucharda on a number of buildings. As a teacher, Kotěra trained a generation of Czech architects, including Josef Gočár, who would bring Czech modernism to its pinnacle in the years leading up to the Nazi occupation in 1939.
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