Josef Kranner

His first project as a Master Builder involved designing a family crypt for the Austrian State Chancellor, Prince Klemens von Metternich at his castle in Plasy.

When this was completed in 1828, he took over his recently deceased father's studio; introducing modern methods he had observed in France.

Together with the historian František Palacký, the painter Josef Vojtěch Hellich, and the architect Hermann Bergmann [de], he created a book on ancient Bohemia.

It was edited by Hellich and the cultural revivalist, Jan Erazim Vocel, and published in 1845 under the title "Grundzüge der böhmischen Alterthumskunde" (Basics of Bohemian Antiquity).

Later, he became interested in a proposal by Václav Michal Pešina [cs], the Canon of St. Vitus Cathedral, to resume construction, which had been paused since the 1770s, and expand the building.