Brno Architecture Manual

The website www.bam.brno.cz provides access to a database including 400 buildings with data on their exact addresses, GPS coordinates, public transport stops in their vicinity, and on their status of listed monuments and accessibility to the public. A brief history of these buildings, the circumstances of their origin, the lives of the owners and architects are mediated in the form of short texts and downloadable audio recordings. The database includes photographic documentation, blueprints and an interactive map of Brno allowing easy search for buildings and planning thematic walks along one of the nine proposed routes, or designing one’s own architectural trail.
The pre-designed architectural walks around the different city districts are also available to Brno inhabitants and to Czech and foreign visitors in printed form – as a map and guidebook. Orientation is easy thanks to the marking on the sidewalk in front of the buildings, which contains the building code and the website. That makes it easy to get information on the building, for example via a mobile phone, or to listen to its story right in the streets of Brno. The trails with maps are also available in printed form – as a leaflet with a map and a guidebook; both are available in the Brno House of Arts and the House of the Lords of Kunštát.

Recently, the original interwar database has been expanded by more than two hundred buildings from the period 1946–1989 and by more architects’ CVs. Following the example of the Brno Architecture Manual, similar projects have been launched in other Czech cities: PAM in Pilsen (www.pam.plzne.cz), LAM in Litomyšl (www.lam.litomysl.cz), and KAM in Hradec Králové (www.kam .hradcekralove.cz). The BAM project takes place thanks to the generous support of the City of Brno and the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.