Architect Peter Pennoyer is famously fluent in all things historical. But when he began designing a house in Hunting Valley, Ohio, he encountered an obscure source of inspiration. The client, an art collector, asked Pennoyer to delve into Czech Cubism, a scarcely known movement that ran a short course in the 1910s and spanned multiple media, from decorative arts to architecture. “It’s a fascinating style but one I knew nothing about,” reflects Pennoyer, who pored over Art Deco catalogs, eventually traveling to Prague to visit surviving examples like the 1912 House of the Black Madonna and a 1913 lamppost. The style was popularized in the city’s Art?el workshops, where radical talents like Josef Go?cár, Pavel Janák, and Vlastislav Hofman broke from neoclassical conventions, studying crystalline structures, orthogonal prisms, and the…
