Jan Kotěra (18 December 1871 – 17 April 1923) was a Czech architect, artist and interior designer, and one of the key figures of modern architecture in Bohemia.

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.

[1] 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.

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.