Romanesque and Gothic Prague
From the 11th century onwards, Romanesque art developed and marked Prague's entry into the sphere of the Christian West. Unfortunately, there are few witnesses left from that period. Only three rotundas or circular churches remain - St. Longin's Rotunda in Nové Město, St. Martin's Rotunda in Vyšehrad and the Rotunda of the Holy Cross near the National Theatre - as well as St. George's Basilica, the last great remnant of the city's first Romanesque castle. Rounded vaults, massive walls and semicircular arches characterize this elegant and functional architecture.
Over the centuries, the Romanesque architecture has undergone significant changes and has often been rebuilt on Romanesque buildings, as in the Gothic period beginning in the 13th century. At that time, due to the many floods of the Vltava, the buildings were raised: this is how the Romanesque ground floors became beautiful vaulted cellars, like the one in the house of the Lords of Kunstadt in the old town! Compared to the sometimes stocky appearance of Romanesque buildings, the Gothic, with its cross vaults, pointed arches and external buttresses, lightens the walls, makes structures higher up and makes buildings brighter thanks to numerous openings. Built from 1230, the convent of Sainte-Agnès is one of the first great Gothic buildings. But the masterpiece of the period remains of course the cathedral of St. Vitus, begun by the Frenchman Mathieu d'Arras and completed by the German Peter Parler and his descendants. It is to the latter that we also owe the Charles Bridge, to which the sovereign Charles IV had a defensive tower added that would become the guardian of the city. Gothic is inseparable from this king builder and instigator of a period of great prosperity, as evidenced by the town hall and its astronomical clock. Another leading architect of the period was Benedikt Ried, who designed the Vadislav Hall and the Cavaliers' Staircase in the Royal Palace. You can admire the superb ribs of the star-shaped vaults.
Harmonious Renaissance
Under the impetus of the Habsburg dynasty, Prague was transformed into a royal city where the influence of the Italian Renaissance can be seen in the palaces erected by the nobility. Medieval castles are then surrounded by beautiful portals and arcade galleries frame their square courtyards, as in the palace of Hrzán and the "House of the Two Bears". The most beautiful representative of this Renaissance period is undoubtedly the Queen Anne's Belvedere, the summer residence of the rulers built in the royal gardens of Prague Castle. In addition to the classical canons of the period (columns, porticoes, arches, symmetry and harmony), local architects added a few special features such as high gables and large cornices, and increased the use of the sgraffito technique, which consisted of painting the façade with two coats of white and black plaster and then scraping the first coat to reveal a motif, often imitating humpbacked bas-reliefs. A fine example of the use of this trompe l'oeil technique can be seen on the façade of the Schwarzenberg Palace.
Baroque Splendors
The art of movement, theatricality, surprise and light effects, curves and undulations and the profusion of décor, the Baroque was expressed in all its splendour in Prague. Baroque is more than an art form... Here, it bears witness to the triumph of Catholicism and the Habsburg dynasty. Inspired by the Church of the Gesù in Rome, the Church of St. Saviour of the Clementinum is the first great Baroque building. In the 18th century, a family of builders left their mark on the city's architecture: 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. The clear and majestic nave, the gigantic dome, the green dome that dominates the Prague sky, the interplay of shapes between the pillars and vaults creating an inner movement, the trompe-l'oeil opening the vault to the sky and the concave and convex façade make it the great masterpiece of Prague Gothic. The Litany of Saints is one of the prayers most used by Baroque Catholicism and it will have its translation in architecture on the Charles Bridge, which will have a cohort of stone saints, giving it the air of the Bridge of the Angels in Rome.
Baroque is also a period of reconstruction after the turmoil of the Thirty Years War. The city then acquired sumptuous palaces, often the work of foreign architects. Thus Andrea Spazza opens the ball with the Wallenstein palace, Francesco Carrati follows with the palace Černín and its astonishing 135 m long façade. Giovanni Battista Alliprandi designed the Lobkowicz Palace around an elliptical shape imagined by Bernini. The Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Mathey built Troja Castle, which combines Roman baroque and French classicism with its central building flanked by symmetrical wings and pavilions. He is also responsible for the beautiful Tuscan palace in Piazza Hradčany. These Baroque palaces and villas also see the blossoming of an art of gardens adorned with fountains, labyrinths and monumental staircases. Due to its unique topography and hilly and rugged landscape, Prague has seen the birth of amazing gardens that extend in terraces on the steep slopes of its hills. Among the gardens not to be missed: the Ledebourg garden and the Palffy garden.
From rococo to eclecticism
In the second half of the 18th century, Baroque gave way to Rococo, whose bold curves and preciousness of decoration are appreciated, as on the façade of the Goltz-Kinsky Palace.
At the beginning of the 19th century, breaking with the theatricality of Baroque and Rococo, Neoclassicism made its appearance. Regular colonnades, symmetrical pavilions and other uses of ancient codes are employed, as with the Theatre of the States. The architects soon grew tired of this neoclassical austerity and began to shift towards eclecticism and references to other styles that had made the city great. The appearance of these styles coincides with the "national awakening" that is shaking the city. Thus, we pastiche the old styles to better underline the richness of the past. The National Museum impresses with its alignment of Corinthian columns and pilasters, its embossed base and its superb glass dome, while the National Theatre is a masterpiece of grandeur and originality. Both are in neo-Renaissance styles, as is the Wiehl house, whose picturesque mix of stepped gables, closed or oriel balconies and colourful sgraffito is appreciated. Josef Mocker will be the great master of the Neo-Gothic. His work in restoring medieval buildings is now recognized as a genuine contribution to the cultural heritage of Prague and the country as a whole, as he is responsible for Karlštejn Castle, which was recreated from ruins and has become one of the great Czech emblems. Other "neo" styles include the Moorish-inspired Spanish Synagogue. The 19th century was also a period of urban renewal. Suburbs are created for workers and middle classes (Smíchov, Žižkov...) beyond the walls, which change from defensive tools to decorative elements. We're cleaning up and beautifying the city. Promenades are built on the riverbanks and new bridges are constructed.
Secession and cubism
At the end of the 19th century, the city experienced a major economic and industrial boom. Construction is accelerating and will bear the mark of the architectural revival that is blowing across Europe... starting with that of Art Nouveau, called Secese in Prague. This new style defends the idea of a total work that works the harmony between the architectural structure and the ornamentation. Curved shapes inspired by animal and vegetable worlds, motifs taken from past civilizations, use of materials hitherto neglected such as stained glass, iron, the Prague Secession breaks with historicist codes. Among the most beautiful representatives of this style: the Municipal House, whose decoration was designed by the genius Alfons Mucha and whose wiggle of the hips in relation to the roadway allows you to admire the Powder Magazine Tower in the distance; the Peterka House, which was designed by the great architect of the time, Jan Kotěra; the Europa Hotel, whose façade undulates with its dynamic arabesques and bases its compositional lines on a regulated geometry; the Wilson station; the Svatopluk bridge and its metallic curves; the Koruna building, whose gallery is crowned by a huge glass dome, or the façade of the former department store U Nováků with its mosaics and ceramics.
Art nouveau will be succeeded by cubism. Very present in painting, we know few architectural witnesses of this style... and most of them are in Prague! Characterized by a work of geometrical and angular forms, by the splintering of the form and the decomposition of the facade into multiple inclined and protruding facets, cubism is astonishing. Josef Chochol designed the cubist façade of the "House for Three Families" in Vyšehrad, as well as most of the houses built below the fortress. There, even the gardens are at an angle! But the most beautiful cubist realisation remains the house with the Black Madonna by Josef Gočár who seeks to dramatise the mass by creating a theatrical effect in the arrangement of the imposing volumes melted into this granular red hue. Another movement will make a lightning appearance in the city of Prague: rondocubism, which favours the use of round and cylindrical shapes and the use of national colours (red and white) as in Josef's Bank of the Legions Gočár or in Adria Palace, which alternate between Renaissance elements and plays on colours and geometric shapes. But this style exalting the Czech nation will soon be crushed by the Soviets who want to erase all traces of national sentiment.Functionalism and brutalism
By the late 1920s, functionalism had spread throughout the city. Influenced by both the Bauhaus and Otto Wagner's teachings, this trend has as its only motto: form follows function. We reject any superfluous ornamentation and favour pure lines, natural light and quality materials such as glass, steel or reinforced concrete. Among the major representatives of this trend are the Bata building on Wenceslas Square with its continuous strips of glass panels; the buildings of the Retirement Institute on Winston Churchill Square with their long horizontal bands of windows and their ceramic-covered facade to resist the fumes of the nearby central station; the Veletržní Palace (Fair Palace) by Josef Fuchs and Oldrich Tyl, whose perfect volumes and pure forms are admired, or the Social Insurance Fund, which, with its thirteen floors, is often considered the city's first skyscraper. Functional architecture is also linked to the question of individual housing first, then collective housing. In terms of individuality, functionalism produces surprising villas, as in the Villa Baba district, where thirty-three villas have been designed by different architects. All have their own identity, but let us note some common characteristics: decorative minimalism, flat roofs, projecting balconies and canopies, monochrome façades (often white), large rectangular bays. We are here in the domestic ideal of progressive architecture. This concept of individual housing will be further developed by Adolf Loos in his villa Müller in the district of S třešovice where he puts his Raumplan theory into practice. For him, the architect first designs space. It involves arranging the volumes of the different rooms in a house according to their functional and representative importance. The villa is thus transformed into a sum of interlocking cubes connected by stairs. The nobility of the materials is used as an ornamentation. In terms of collective housing, functionalist architects imagine "common houses", a democratic vision of an architecture designed for all, where individual housing and collective equipment cells are intertwined.
After the war, these functionalist principles, particularly in terms of collective housing, were largely adopted by the Soviets, but with less aesthetic concern. Between 1948 and 1989, the city acquired large massive complexes built with cheap and prefabricated materials, as on the trays around the city. Often isolated, some of these groups are nevertheless connected to the centre by the metro, which is emerging thanks to a partnership between Czechoslovakia and the USSR, with the creation of the Moskeveska station (now Andel station), an exact replica of a Russian station. In the 1950s, socialist realism was used in monumental buildings to the glory of the regime, such as the International Hotel in Djevice, which recalls the Stalinist Moscow skyscrapers. From the 1970s onwards, it was brutalism that developed with raw concrete structures that revealed the pipes and ducts outside the buildings. Among the astonishing achievements of the 1970s and 1980s were the tower of the Karel water tower H ubáček and Zdeněk Partman, the high-tech architecture of the 216-metre high Žižkov transmission tower, or the Nová scéna by Karel Prager, an elegant glass brick case (4,306 in total!) that responds to the National Theatre of which it is an extension.
Since 1990
The emblematic achievement of the early 1990s is Frank Gehry and Vlado Milunić's "Dancing House". Nicknamed "Ginger and Fred" by Prague locals, this building made headlines with its combination of two buildings, one in glass, the other in concrete, which seem to dance as if carried along in an undulating movement. The other great architect to have worked in Prague is Jean Nouvel. We owe him the elegant Zlatý Anděl building, whose curves seem to follow those of the road. He also had a project for the rehabilitation of the Smíchov district, from which he wanted to create a horizontal line of contemplation over the city and its heritage, but this vast urban planning project has not been realized... yet! The rehabilitation of Masaryk station has been entrusted to the famous Zaha Hadid studio, and all around it, a brand new business district will be created on the remains of former industrial wastelands. But far from all these pharaonic projects, Prague's architects are today seeking above all to reconcile economic development with the preservation of the city's heritage, giving priority to artisanal techniques and noble materials, 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 purified architecture, between history and modernity.
