Amazing Middle Ages
The great Slavic archaeological site of Mikulčice bears witness to the splendor of the Kingdom of Greater Moravia in the 8th and 9th centuries. Protected by the river, the site is accessible via wooden bridges whose structures remain. The heart of the site, however, is protected by powerful ramparts housing the foundations of the largest Great Moravian church ever discovered... 35 x 11 m all the same! If the basilica is made of stone, the princely palace is made of brick. The more modest residential dwellings were often built as log cabins. From the 11th century onwards, Romanesque art developed and marked the country's entry into the sphere of the Christian West. In Prague, you can see the Rotunda of St. Longin in Nové Město, as well as the Basilica of St. George, the last great remnant of the city's first Romanesque castle. Rounded vaults, massive walls and round arches characterize this elegant and functional architecture. Over the centuries, the Romanesque architecture underwent important modifications and was often rebuilt on Romanesque buildings. During the 13th century Gothic period, due to the numerous floods of the Vltava River, Prague's buildings were raised... this is how Romanesque first floors became beautiful vaulted cellars! The bourgeois houses in Kutna Hora also have beautiful barrel-vaulted cellars. Compared to the sometimes squat appearance of the Romanesque buildings, the Gothic style with its ribbed vaults, pointed arches and external buttresses makes it possible to lighten the walls, make the structures taller and brighter thanks to numerous openings. The masterpiece of the period is the Cathedral of St. Vitus in Prague, completed by the German Peter Parler. It is to him that we also owe the Charles Bridge, to which the ruler Charles IV added a defensive tower that will become the guardian of the city. The Gothic style is inseparable from this king builder and instigator of a period of great prosperity, as evidenced by thetown hall and its astronomical clock in Prague. But it is undoubtedly in the castles and defensive works that the proud and powerful lines of Gothic are best expressed. See the imposing walls and amazing system of defensive basins at Telč Castle, or the original small castle Hradek and the circular tower at Český Krumlov Castle. Both of these towns have, moreover, preserved their medieval urban layout intact with their squares and mazes of narrow streets and vaulted passages in which it is good to get lost and stroll. Don't miss the town of Trebič with its beautiful St. Prokopius Basilica built inside a 13th century Benedictine monastery, and especially its Jewish quarter which has preserved its medieval urbanism. You will discover typical buildings with vaulted first floors and floors with wooden ceilings. The oldest Jewish cemetery in the city dates back to the 15th century and houses some splendid funerary art, including superb stone sculptures.
Harmonious Renaissance
Under the impetus of the Habsburg dynasty, Prague became a royal city where the influence of the Italian Renaissance can be seen in the palaces built by the nobility. The medieval castles were surrounded by superb portals and arcades framing their square courtyards. The most beautiful representative of this Renaissance period is undoubtedly Queen Anne's Belvedere, the summer residence of the sovereigns built in the royal gardens of Prague Castle. To the classical canons of the time (columns, porticos, arches, symmetry and harmony), local architects added a few specific features such as high gables and large cornices, and made frequent use of the sgraffito technique, which consisted of painting the facade with two coats of white and black plaster and then scraping off the first coat to reveal a motif, often imitating bas-reliefs in bossage. These elements can be found in one of the great jewels of the country: Litomyšl Castle, a symbol of the importance given by the aristocracy to country residences. The town of Slavonice also has some beautiful houses with Renaissance facades.
Baroque Splendors
The art of movement, theatricality, surprise and light effects, curves and undulations, and profusion of decoration, Baroque is expressed in all its splendor in Prague. Baroque is more than an art form... here it is a testimony to the triumph of Catholicism and the Habsburg dynasty. During this period, a family of builders left their mark on the architecture of the city: the Dietzenhofer family. Originally from Bavaria, the brothers trained in Prague with the Italian master Carlo Lurago. Christoph Dietzenhofer is responsible for the church of St. Nicholas
. Its clear and majestic nave, its gigantic dome, its green dome that dominates the Prague sky, its play of forms between the pillars and the vaults creating an interior movement, its trompe-l'oeil opening the vault to the sky and its concave and convex facade make it the great masterpiece of the Baroque. The Litany of Saints is one of the most used prayers of Baroque Catholicism and it will be translated into architecture on the Charles Bridge, which will be equipped with a cohort of stone saints.The Baroque period was also a period of reconstruction after the troubles of the Thirty Years' War. Prague was then equipped with sumptuous palaces, often the work of foreign architects. Francesco Carrati imagined the Černín Palace and its astonishing 135-meter-long facade, Giovanni Battista Alliprandi designed the Lobkowicz Palace articulated around an elliptical shape imagined by Bernini, and the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Mathey is credited with the Troja Castle blending Roman Baroque and French classicism with perfect symmetry. These baroque palaces and villas also saw the blossoming of an art of gardens decorated with fountains, labyrinths and monumental staircases. A baroque that finds its apogee in the incredible complex of the Archbishop's Castle
in Kromeriz. The four monumental and baroque wings of the castle frame a trapezoidal courtyard offering astonishing plays of perspective, while cave-like rooms connect the castle to the garden. The pleasure garden is an authentic Italian masterpiece with its octagonal rotunda surrounded by geometric parterres, its 244 m long gallery decorated with busts and statues and its labyrinthine pools and mazes. The historic village of Holašovice is a superb example of South Bohemian folk baroque. Arranged around a large rectangular square, its twenty-three farmhouses, organized according to a U-shaped plan centered on a courtyard, are distinguished by their nicely rounded gables with superb stucco decorations and beautiful bright colors. The Olomouc Baroque style of decoration, of which the Holy Trinity Column is the proudest representative, is a richness that has been pushed to the limit. Symbolizing the devotion and pride of the city's inhabitants, this column impresses with its dimensions (35 m high and 17 m in diameter) and its statuary, the work of Moravian artist Ondřej Zahner. See how the arrangement of the decorative elements creates an almost pyramidal movement! And how can we not mention the unique style developed by Jan Blažej Santini, which many called "Gothic Baroque"? In Zelená Hora, don't miss the pilgrimage church of St. John of Nepomuk, with its Gothic windows and arched doors, and its incredible plan, in which the rays that intersect in the center of the church determine the position of the chapels and create a star-shaped shape, creating a decidedly Baroque play on perspective. It was under his pencil strokes that the very Cistercian cathedral of Notre-Dame de Sedlec was transformed into a gothic-baroque jewel and opened the ball of an 18th century that juggled styles, mixing baroque abundance and classical lines, and reinvented landscape art. Numerous castles were transformed into astonishing pleasure residences, such as Litomyšl Castle. The latter has a superb garden, a surprising mixture of French order and English romanticism, and above all a magnificent theater with classical lines whose original decorations can be admired. The great project of the princely family of Liechtenstein, which began in the 17th century, continues and gives rise to the cultural landscape of Lednice-Valtice, entirely devoted to demonstrating the prestige of the lineage. Valtice Castle, which has been extensively redesigned in Baroque style, is the central point from which all the avenues connecting the various parts of the estate start. Lednice Castle is a mixture of Renaissance, Baroque, Classical and Neo-Gothic. But if the estate is so impressive, it is above all for the titanic landscaping work that has been carried out there: raising the Lednice park, digging a new canal leading to the Dyje... Hunting lodges, temples, belvederes, obelisks, manor houses populate this nature that has been progressively reinvented according to the British romantic canons, as the Englishe Anlagen surrounding the pond clearly show. A mixture of genres that opens the way to eclecticism..From eclecticism to cubism
The appearance of the "neo" styles coincided with the "national awakening" that shook the country in the 19th century. Thus, old styles were pastiched in order to better emphasize the richness of the past. In Prague, the National Museum impresses with its alignment of Corinthian columns and pilasters, its bossed base and its superb glass dome. The neo-Renaissance style of the Wiehl House is also evident in its picturesque mix of stepped gables, oriels and colored sgraffiti. Josef Mocker was the great master of the Neo-Gothic style. His work in restoring medieval buildings is recognized today as an authentic contribution to Czech cultural heritage. The castle of Karlštejn, for example, which was recreated from ruins and has become one of the great emblems of the country, is due to him. The 19th century was also a period of urban renewal for Prague. Suburbs were created for the workers and middle classes (Smíchov, Žižkov...) beyond the walls, which changed from a defensive tool to a decorative element. Promenades were built along the river banks and new bridges were constructed. At the end of the 19th century, the city experienced a major economic and industrial boom. Construction accelerated and bore the mark of the architectural revival that was sweeping across Europe... starting with the Art Nouveau style called Secese in Prague. This new style defends the idea of a total work of art. Curved forms inspired by the animal and plant worlds, motifs taken from past civilizations, recourse to materials that had been neglected until then such as stained glass or iron, the Prague Secession broke with historicist codes. Among the most beautiful representatives of this style: the Municipal House in Prague, whose entire decoration was imagined by the brilliant Alfons Mucha and whose wiggle in relation to the roadway allows one to admire the Poudrière Tower, the city's emblematic Gothic building, the Peterka House, which was designed by the great architect of the time, Jan Kotěra, and the Koruna building, whose gallery is crowned by an immense glass dome. Eclecticism and Art Nouveau can also be found in the country's three most beautiful spa towns: Františkovy Lázně, Karlovy Vary and Mariánské Lázně. Sumptuous neoclassical colonnades, voluptuous and airy floral patterns revealing masterpieces of sculpture and ironwork, astonishing theaters and casinos and majestic bathhouses... these cities turn into real open-air museums. Then, Art Nouveau was followed by Cubism. Very present in painting, we know only few architectural witnesses of this style... and most of them are in Prague. Characterized by a work of geometric and angular forms, by the explosion of the form and the decomposition of the facade in multiple inclined and projecting facets, cubism astonishes. Josef Chochol designed the cubist facade of the "House for Three Families" in Vyšehrad. But the most beautiful Cubist achievement remains the house with the Black Madonna by Josef Gočár, which seeks to dramatize the mass by creating a theatrical effect in the arrangement of imposing volumes melted in this granular red color. Another movement will make a flash appearance in the city of Prague: rondocubism, which favors the use of round and cylindrical forms and the use of national colors (red and white) as in the Bank of the Legions by Josef Gočár.
Functionalism and brutalism
The 1920s marked the appearance of functionalism. Influenced by the Bauhaus as well as by the teachings of Otto Wagner, this movement's only motto is: form follows function. It rejects all superfluous ornamentation and favors clean lines, natural light and quality materials such as glass, steel or reinforced concrete. Among the great representatives of this trend in Prague are the Bata building on Wenceslas Square with its continuous bands of glass panels, the Veletržní Palace (Fair Palace) by Josef Fuchs and Oldřich Tyl, whose perfection of volume and purity of form are admired, or the Social Insurance Fund, which, with its thirteen floors, is often considered the first skyscraper in the city. The Villa Baba district is home to thirty-three villas designed by different architects. All of them have their own identity, but there are some common characteristics: decorative minimalism, flat roofs, protruding balconies and canopies, monochrome facades (often white), and large rectangular windows. This is the domestic ideal of progressive architecture. This concept of individual housing will be pushed further by Adolf Loos in his villa Müller in the district of Střešovice where he puts into practice his theory of the Raumplan, which consists of arranging the volumes of the various rooms of a house according to their functional and representative importance. The villa thus becomes a sum of interlocking cubes connected by stairs. The nobility of the materials serves as ornamentation. Another sublime villa of the time is the Tugendhat villa in Brno, a masterpiece by Mies van der Rohe. Made of reinforced concrete slabs supported by steel beams, the villa breaks new ground with its delicate rosewood and onyx partitions that delineate the space almost imperceptibly. The winter garden and large windows let in pleasant natural light. In terms of collective housing, functionalist architects imagined communal houses, a democratic vision of an architecture thought for all where the cells of individual housing and collective facilities are intertwined. After the war, these functionalist principles, particularly in terms of collective housing, were widely adopted by the Soviets, but with less aesthetic concern. Between 1948 and 1989, the outskirts of the large Czech cities saw the appearance of large massive and isolated complexes built with cheap and prefabricated materials. In Prague, some of these complexes were connected to the center by the metro, which appeared thanks to a partnership between Czechoslovakia and the USSR, a partnership symbolized by the Moskeveska station (now Andel station), an exact replica of a Russian station. In the 1950s, socialist realism was used in monumental constructions all to the glory of the regime, as with the International Hotel in Djevice, which recalls the Stalinist skyscrapers in Moscow. From the 1970s onwards, concrete became the leading material in buildings that oscillated between brutalism and architectural expressionism, where concrete was combined with glass and steel. Among the most astonishing creations, let us note, in Prague, the high-tech architecture of Žižkov's television tower, 216 m high, Karel Prager's Nová scéna, a case covered with 4,306 glass bricks, or the Federal Assembly built on the concept of city on city with its pillars and footbridges connecting the different spaces. But if we had to keep only one example of this concrete expressionism, it would of course be the television antenna on Mount Jested. Its astonishing shape of a rotating hyperbola made of reinforced concrete earned its architect, Karel Hubáček, the Auguste Perret prize... the Holy Grail of modernity!
Since 1990
In Prague, the emblematic achievement of the early 1990s is the " Dancing House " by Frank Gehry and Vlado Milunić. Renamed "Ginger and Fred" by the people of Prague, this building made headlines with its combination of two buildings, one made of glass, the other of concrete, which seem to dance, as if carried away in an undulating movement. The other great architect to have worked in Prague is Jean Nouvel. He was responsible for the elegant Zlatý Anděl building, whose curves seem to follow the curves of the road. Along the Náplavka quay, it is impossible to miss the amazing elliptical pivoting windows made of organic glass, looking like portholes, allowing access to the former storage buildings rehabilitated into restaurants and cafes. Among the very beautiful contemporary Czech projects, let's also mention the church of the Beatified Restituta in Brno, an astonishing circular concrete structure illuminated by a stained glass sky and connected by a footbridge to a tower whose top lights up at night like a lighthouse, the building entirely covered with translucent glass, symbolizing the revival of the Lasvit glassworks in Nový Bor, the undulating roof (accessible to pedestrians) of the new glass, concrete and wood building of the famous Lahofer winery, or the wood and steel observation tower at the top of Velká Deštná hill. But far from all these pharaonic projects, Czech architects today are trying to reconcile economic development with the preservation of heritage by favoring artisanal techniques and noble materials that are as local as possible. In this way, they are the direct heirs of Jože Plečnik, architect of Prague Castle from 1911 to 1935, who imagined a refined architecture, between history and modernity. A harmonious dialogue between the eras can be found at Helfstyn Castle, whose Renaissance ruins now have a new glass and steel setting. The Pavlov Archaeological Park is home to a new building with an almost imperceptible presence. Buried in the ground, the building continues the juxtaposition of habitat strata, following millennial remains!
