NowPrague

Architecture

Architecture in Prague

Prague was never bombed, so its centre holds six centuries in unbroken sequence and every insertion is judged against that. The buildings people go out of their way for are the ones that took the risk anyway.

• Kunsthalle Praha

  ·

  Completed 2022

  Schindler Seko

  A private art gallery below the castle, converted from the Zenger electrical substation. Schindler Seko compressed the surviving transformer equipment into a fraction of its old space and opened the rest as three tall galleries. The 1930s facade stays and a new glazed floor sits on top, set back so it reads as separate. A building that once powered the tram network now runs on a corner of its own capacity.

• Dancing House

  ·

  Completed 1996

  Vlado Milunić · Frank Gehry

  An office building on a riverside plot left empty since it was bombed in 1945. Vlado Milunić and Frank Gehry paired a glass tower pinched at the waist with a solid one beside it, so the corner reads as two figures. Cornice lines are carried across from the nineteenth century neighbours on both sides. It was the test of whether the city would allow anything new on the embankment at all.

• Villa Müller

  ·

  Completed 1930

  Adolf Loos

  A house in Střešovice, plain white outside and intricate within. Adolf Loos arranged the rooms at different levels around a central core, so the plan cannot be drawn on a single floor plate. Materials shift room to room, from green marble to mahogany, while the exterior stays a bare cube with windows only where they are needed. It is the clearest surviving demonstration of what he meant by the plan of volumes.

• Municipal House

  ·

  Completed 1912

  Osvald Polívka · Antonín Balšánek

  A concert hall and civic building at the edge of the old town. Osvald Polívka and Antonín Balšánek covered it in art nouveau work by the leading Czech artists of the moment, including a hall painted by Alfons Mucha. The structure behind all of it is a straightforward iron and concrete frame. Czechoslovak independence was declared from its balcony six years after it opened.

• St Vitus Cathedral

  ·

  Founded 1344

  Peter Parler

  The cathedral inside Prague Castle, begun in 1344 and consecrated in 1929. Matthias of Arras laid out a French Gothic plan and died eight years in, and Peter Parler took over at twenty-three and replaced the standard vaulting with a net of ribs that ignores the bays beneath it. Work stopped in 1419 and the nave stood open for four centuries. The west end is nineteenth and twentieth century work, and the join was left visible.