48 The Imperial Spa

On today’s Laubeho náměstí (Laube Square), named after a Teplice geologist and polar explorer, there once stood the inn At the Green Frog, and next to it the Hospital Mill, the first in a cascade of mills on the so-called Cat Brook. The growing fame of the spa and the gradual drying up of the brook meant that both buildings were pulled down between 1840 and 1870, and the Imperial Spa was built in their place.

The original neo-Renaissance building was designed by the town engineer and builder Adolf Siegmund. Its later rebuilding was designed by Max Loos, who came from the Austrian noble family von Losimfeldt. From 1890 Loos worked as the town architect of Ústí nad Labem, but after 1895 he opened his own office in Teplice. That is why you can find his work in both towns. In Teplice alone, besides the Imperial Spa, there is Lipový dvůr, the At the Russian Tsar house and the Functionalist building of the Concordia insurance company (its main designer was Paul Schaeffer-Heyrothsberge).

Soon after it opened in 1871, the imposing spa building was already welcoming distinguished visitors to the town. Among them was the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph I, in whose honour the building was named.

In 1912 and 1913, to Loos’s plans, there were major changes: the adjoining Caffésalon was pulled down and the building gained more storeys. The building saw further changes in the 1960s, when, among other things, the wooden colonnade linking the spa house with a wooden concert pavilion disappeared from the park.

After the war, the neighbouring street, previously called Královská třída (Royal Avenue), was also named after the building. The Imperial Spa treats disorders of the musculoskeletal system and vascular diseases; there is also a clinic of laser and aesthetic surgery.