Jan Letzel was a Czech architect.
Jan Letzel was born in 1880 in the town of Náchod in north East Bohemia, near the Polish border. The son of a hotel owner, he studied at Prague's School of Creative and Industrial Art under Jan Kotera, 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.
Jan Letzer 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 Kanto Earthquake, and returned home to Czechoslovakia. Suffering from ill health, he died on December 26th 1925, at the age of 45.
